Ruth at her desk in her home office

Ruth Cowan has a talent for inventing careers. In pursuing the most recent career that she has invented for herself, Ruth managed to bring about a Congressional Breakfast devoted to the topic of gender equity in South Africa. Her aim was to help bring back into public awareness efforts to advance the cause of human rights in that country. She is currently making arrangements for the filming of a documentary on democracy building in South Africa, and has set up the Morris and Ruth B. Cowan Foundation to help finance it.

The first career that Ruth invented, after a distinguished academic career spanning over 30 years, was as a consultant for colleges and other nonprofit entities on building up their organizations. Ruth's advice covered matters ranging from comprehensive strategic planning to reminding clients of the need to set up a mechanism for responding promptly and adequately to major advertising campaigns that would otherwise be wasted. Her article, "Prescription for Small-College Turnaround," was published in the January/February 1983 issue of Change, a journal of higher education.

In between these two careers of her own devising, Ruth did work for several international organizations, and continues to do so. In 1990, she accepted an invitation to serve as Founding President of the Board of Directors of Pro Mujer, an organization that provides poor women in Latin America with the means to earn livelihoods for themselves and their families through micro-lending (very small loans), business training, and healthcare support (www.promujer.org). At the time, Pro Mujer had a small local program in Bolivia, but it now offers its program nationally in Bolivia and in Peru, Nicaragua, Mexico and Argentina. Ruth's initial mission was to ensure that Pro Mujer had an outstanding Board of Directors, and the mission was accomplished.

As a volunteer with the American Jewish World Service, Ruth accepted an invitation in February 1998 to come to El Salvador to provide technical assistance in strategic planning to a community development group known as ITAMA, which is supported by a United States foundation, the Foundation for Self-Sufficiency in Central America. Ruth conducted a three-day workshop in strategic planning for ITAMA, after she had thoroughly familiarized herself with its work and gotten to know its staff. She came away from the experience with a profound respect for the members of the organization, who were working with inadequate resources to help poor people in rural communities, and for the people in those communities.

Ruth with mementos from working trips: cloth runners,
Bolivia; statue, El Salvador; flower holder, Egypt

In connection with her work with Pro Mujer and her knowledge about micro-financing, Ruth was invited in 2004 to speak with the founders of The Global Partnership for Afghanistan (GPFA). GPFA had been formed in 2002 to work for a self-sufficient economy in that country. It aims to achieve sustainable employment and development by providing assistance, through projects that will be self-perpetuating, to all who work the land (www.gpfa.org). Ruth thought that micro-financing, which requires a great many small borrowers of funds deposited in banks, was not appropriate for Afghanistan. She agreed, however, to serve on GPFA's Board, and currently heads its Governance and Nominating Committee.

On the basis of her work with organizations devoted to helping poor people, Ruth says that she came to the realization that good government is critical to the success of efforts to alleviate poverty. After several years of active participation in Pro Mujer, she felt that the organization had reached a level of sophistication sufficient to justify her in taking time off from her work for that organization so that she could study in depth what it is that creates good government. Her admiration for the South African Constitution led her to focus her research on South Africa's government.

In her usual self-starting fashion, Ruth began by going to South Africa to make contacts with people and organizations interested in the the rule of law. She then made a study of the courts, including the South African Constitutional Court, especially with regard to women's rights. In addition, she studied the work of the South African Women's Legal Centre, a nonprofit law center started by a group of women lawyers to advance women's rights through constitutional litigation and advocacy on women's issues. She also consulted a political scientist, Tom Karas, who had been engaged for most of a long life in advancing human rights and constitutional democracy in South Africa. He advised Ruth that she could best contribute to the efforts to advance human rights in South Africa by helping to make the public aware, once again, of a cause that no longer held the world's attention as it once had.

It was this advice that inspired Ruth to work to bring about a Congressional Breakfast. She recalls that she didn't think it was ever going to happen, and attributes her success to the fact that she had an affiliation with an institution, the Women & Politics Institute of the School of Public Affairs at American University, in Washington, D.C. In 2004, the Institute had given her a three-year appointment as a Scholar in Residence.

Only members of Congress are empowered to convene a Congressional Breakfast, but Ruth approached senior staff of members of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, Black Caucus, and Caucus on Women's Issues, and the Representatives themselves, and the Congressional Breakfast was indeed convened, on April 13, 2005. It commemorated South Africa's tenth anniversary as a constitutional democracy, and the title of the program was "The Impact of South Africa's Constitutional Court on Gender Equity." Speakers included two Justices of the South Africa Constitutional Court, who were introduced to an audience of about 350 people by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Ruth first began to focus her attention on women's rights in the early 1970's when, as an assistant professor of political science at one of the community colleges of the City University of New York and the only tenured woman in the department, she was denied a promotion that she had been encouraged to seek. At the same time, tenured male faculty members were promoted to the rank above her. Rather than acquiesce in something that she felt was wrong, she decided to protest. She filed a grievance against the college and a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

Ruth's filing of her sex-discrimination complaint against the University was the beginning of what she says was for her a "transformative" experience. She started, she says, as "non-aggessive" and ended up as self-confident, and the experience brought women's rights, and women's welfare, to front and center of her professional life.

It also led her to speak up at a meeting where the president of the City University was speaking about, and only about, discrimination against minorities. Ruth piped up, from the back of the room, "And women!" This brought her to the attention of another woman faculty member who was interested in doing something about gender discrimination at the University. Ruth joined her and others in setting up another meeting, where she was put forward as a leader of a group whose members sued the City University for gender discrimination--and won.

The suit was filed in 1973 and ended with a whopping settlement in 1983, but long before that Ruth had been promoted to full professor. Ruth left the City University in 1980 and became Dean of Lifelong Learning at Marymount Manhattan College, in New York City, for seven years. She followed that with a three-year stint as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty at Bloomfield College, in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

Not all work all the time: On Lake
Titicaca, Bolivia, some years ago

Ruth was at a meeting of the Women's City Club of New York in 1973 where Abraham Beame, running for the Mayor of New York City, made a pledge to establish a New York City Commission on the Status of Women. He was able to make good on his pledge, and asked Ruth to head the Commission, which was established in 1975. Ruth continued as president of the Commission into the Administration of the next mayor, Edward Koch, which began in 1978. Her involvement in a national organization of such commissions brought her into contact with an ever-widening circle of women interested in advancing the cause of women's rights. The United Nations designated 1975 as International Women's Year, and Ruth participated in all the International Women's Year meetings. She represented the City of New York at the first International Conference on the Status of Women, in Beijing, in 1995.

For the record, Ruth obtained a B.S. degree from Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, an M.A. in political science from the University of Illinois, a Ph.D. in political science from New York University, and a post-doctoral Certificate of Management from Harvard University.

In addition to a talent for inventing careers, Ruth has a talent for making friends, and keeps them from the successive stages of her life. She relishes her role as a favorite aunt to generations of nieces and nephews on her side of the family and her late husband's. Her age? Irrelevant, says Ruth, so long as a person is doing work, volunteer or otherwise.

RUTH COWAN

Ruth speaking after a screening of her film at
a meeting of the NYC Bar Assoc. in Sept. 2008

When Ruth Cowan was in the Spotlight in the July/August 2007 issue of Eldercountry she was planning to make a documentary on "democracy-building" in South Africa. Now she's done it, and her film, Courting Justice, about women judges sitting on South Africa'a highest courts, could have a major social impact on that country.

After a screening at a meeting of the New York City Bar Association in Manhattan on September 18, 2008, Ruth spoke about the documentary she created, which has been shown extensively in South Africa at film festivals and universities. The women judges in the film were born and raised under apartheid. The message they convey is that they work very hard to establish a human-rights-based constitutional democracy in South Africa, and that the struggle to overcome the obstacles they faced as women to be in a position to do so was difficult, but that it has all been worth it.

The film will be shown to South Africa's Parliament and in schools throughout South Africa. The message of the women judges, "Hard but worth it," should help to inspire girls throughout the country to make the same effort. One speaker at the Bar Association meeting spoke of at least one young woman lawyer contemplating leaving the field who was inspired by that message.

Currently, according to Ruth, the majority of law students in South Africa are women, and they are by common agreement the best law students, but they are leaving the legal profession in droves because of the discrimination they face.

So far screenings of the film have been scheduled in this country at law schools at Georgetown, Harvard, Maryland, and Pittsburgh Universities, and at Cornell University, as well as at meetings of the National Association of Women Judges and the New York Women's Forum, an organization of New York women leaders who come together to interact with each other and to take an active role in matters of importance to them.

Ruth had decided to make a documentary film on the subject rather than write a book (although she plans to do that, too) on the ground that these days it takes a film to bring a subject to people's attention. She is not, however, a professional filmmaker or producer, so how did she get it done?

As a political scientist, Ruth has long been interested in South Africa, in particular, its Constitution and its judicial system, and she had made many trips there. She started on her documentary by traveling there to interview a number of its women judges and then writing up a proposal for the film. She also set up a foundation for fund-raising purposes, but she borrowed a substantial amount of money at the outset to assure that there would be funds for the project. She did not apply for the grant that she ultimately received from the Ford Foundation until, she says, she had "something to show them."

It was while she was in South Africa, in Cape Town, that a researcher for her documentary introduced Ruth to a filmmaker, who recommended Luna Films. Luna Films was responsible for locating the director, the film editor, and the composer for the background music, although Ruth was involved in these decisions.

The director chosen for the film was Jane Lipman, who had grown up in exile after her parents, who had been activists in South Africa in the 50's and 60's, had to leave in 1963. She returned to South Africa in 1998, in part because she felt that as an experienced film producer she could do work there that was worth while. The film was edited by Dara Kell, and the music is by Philip Miller.

Ruth went to South Africa six or seven times to work with the director and producers while the subjects of the documentary were interviewed on camera (the film was not scripted) and to work with the editor's team afterwards to determine the themes (technically, in filmmaking terms, the "arcs") that would be developed.

Courting Justice is being distributed by Women Make Movies, a nonprofit media arts organization which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women. For more information about Women Make Movies, click on www.wmm.com.

–Jan Oser

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