PD Editorial: Helen Rudee, a Sonoma County trailblazer

Helen Rudee shattered a glass ceiling long before anyone had heard the phrase.

Rudee, who died Wednesday at 100, was the first woman elected to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, unseating a male incumbent in 1976.

She served three terms on the board and, after stepping down, became a mentor and role model for a generation of women who followed in local politics.

Last year, when the board's first female majority was seated, Rudee was an honored guest in the supervisors' meeting room.

“Without you blazing that trail, it just wouldn't have happened,” Supervisor Shirlee Zane said on a day celebrated as Helen Rudee Day in Sonoma County.

Rudee wasn't the first local woman to hold office, and county supervisor wasn't her first elected office. She had served for 10 years on the Santa Rosa Board of Education when she announced that she was running for supervisor.

But a board seat, a full-time job with an office and a salary, had been the province of male politicians since Sonoma County was founded in 1850. Some people didn't take Rudee's candidacy seriously, but she was elected in a landslide and re-elected twice by comfortable margins.

Colleagues described her with words that might seem out of place in the hyper-partisan atmosphere of contemporary politics - polite, deliberative, always open-minded and quick to deflect credit to others.

“I am only one of five people,” Rudee said in an interview as she prepared to retire from office in 1989. “It takes three or four votes, so we can't credit ourselves for individual acts.”

Rudee served with two other women during her tenure on the board, but women remained - and still remain - under-represented in American politics.

Women hold less than 20 percent of congressional seats in and just 25 percent of statewide elective offices, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. In California, women held 25 percent of supervisorial seats after the 2016 election, up from 22 percent two years earlier. And Sonoma is now one of five counties with female majorities.

After leaving office, Rudee made it her mission to support women running for local office, and many credit her with clearing the way for them to compete and win elections.

“She is a trailblazer who has made it better for all women,” then-Rep. Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma said on the House floor in a 2004 birthday tribute to Rudee.

Rudee's portrait graces the south side of The Press Democrat's headquarters in downtown Santa Rosa in a mural commemorating 100 people who influenced Sonoma County history in the 20th century. Her influence continues well into the 21st century.

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