Former Gov. Barbara Roberts said that her struggle for the rights of her autistic son was the catalyst that drove her to eventually become Oregon’s first and only female governor.
Roberts spoke to students and staff Thursday in the Town and Gown room in the fourth of six woman’s history events on campus.

When her autistic son Mike, who now works in the MHCC mailroom, was denied a public education in the first grade, she began a fight in Salem for disabled students to have a right to an education. “I simply could not accept the unfairness of it; the fact that my son’s disability would be exacerbated by his also being uneducated,” she said. “I came to realize I had two crucial assets: a cause and a mother’s anger.”

After meeting with many legislators and a public hearing where her son testified, a bill was sent to the senate and eventually became the first special education rights law in the Unites States.

Since then, she has served on different school boards, including MHCC’s, was a state representative and eventually became house majority leader. After two terms as secretary of state, she was elected governor in 1991. She has been a strong supporter of public education, human rights, and government efficiency. She strongly opposed Measure 5 and says it is the main cause of tax revenue being mismanaged today.

She credits much of her success to the “foremothers” who took leadership roles and demanded the rights they deserve. “They broke the molds and blazed the trail,” she said. She recognized the many changes that have taken place in recent years and how they have forever changed the course of women’s rights. “It is now impossible to put Jeannie back in the bottle,” she said.

Ironically, she said she hopes the reverence she is currently held with as Oregon’s only female governor will not last into the future. “And school children will be told how I was Oregon’s first woman governor,” she said. “Hopefully by then, some kid’s going to pop up and say, ‘Why was that ever a big deal?’ And that’s when we’ll know that history has truly changed for women in this country: when it’s no longer a big deal.”