Musings: The fearless women in our Sonoma history

Sonoma County gets to take some credit for the establishment of Women’s History Month. In January of 1978, the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women invited all local women to participate in the celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8. They wanted to raise awareness about the amount of women’s history that has been left out of standard textbooks.

Women’s History Month grew out of that first celebration in Sonoma County. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter declared the week of March 8 as National Women’s History Week. The U.S. Congress followed by establishing it as a national celebration, and six years later, it was expanded to the entire month of March.

The Sonoma Index-Tribune was an active supporter of the county women’s commission for that first event in 1978, not only promoting it in advance, but also dedicating part of its front page plus and entire section of the newspaper on March 2. Our women’s editor Kathy Swett, and reporter Sue Sharek, wrote numerous articles on our Valley’s extraordinary women for that special issue.

Those two women and those who came before and after them, were carrying on a tradition of female leadership and enterprise at the I-T that goes back to the beginning of the late 19th century, when my grand-aunt Celeste Granice Murphy, started writing articles for the family paper while still a student at Sonoma High School. She went on to graduate from UC Berkeley and eventually succeeded her father (my great grandfather) Harry Granice, when he died unexpectedly in 1915. Celeste (called Celie by family and friends) ran the newspaper for the next 34 years.

Inspired by her grandmother, Rowena Granice, an early California journalist and the state’s first woman novelist, Aunt Celie was known for her fearless, hard-hitting editorials prodding local and state government officials to act for the betterment of her beloved Sonoma Valley. She was also well respected within the ranks of California’s most powerful newspaper publishers, all of whom were men.

She led an incredibly interesting and successful professional life, but I also knew her as a loving aunt, who was equally at home in her house with family and friends.

She doted on me as a virtual grandson, and loved it when I brought her freshly-caught trout from our local creeks. She always insisted I join her and my Uncle Walter for a trout dinner.

It never occurred to me at the time that she couldn’t be the boss at the newspaper. Her status was a given. Nobody, especially in my family, ever questioned who was in charge.

I grew up then believing my grandmother and mother, like my Aunt Celie, were the norm – strong, fearless, resolute and competent. My grandmother, Helen Allen, was the Index-Tribune’s business manager for more than two decades. My mother, Jean Lynch, who was a legal secretary before she got married, chose not to work at the newspaper, but nobody in the family, my father included, questioned who had the strongest say on how our family and family business were managed.

Mom, gram and my grand-aunt Celie never exactly fit the traditional idea that a woman’s place was in the home. Nor would my mom accept that men were exempt from tasks traditionally assigned to women in the home.

She insisted that I learn how to cook, wash and iron my own clothes, sew on missing buttons and learn to type. As a result of the latter requirement, I was the only freshman boy at Sonoma Valley High School in a typing class of 30 girls.

Growing up here, I knew a lot women like my mom and grandmother who stepped up during WWII when many of the men were at war. Perhaps that’s why it seemed natural in 1978 for our family newspaper to support and affirm the status of women as equal to men.

It also seems especially fitting to me today that a woman, Emily Charrier, leads the Index-Tribune as its Editor and Publisher. She is not only highly capable, but also carrying on a Sonoma Valley tradition that began more than a 125 years ago.

Bill Lynch was the longtime publisher of the Index-Tribune.