Marin Women's Hall of Fame

Annette Klang Smail

          While born a California native, Annette Klang Smail has spent much of her traveling both around the world and to various points across the United States. Her world travel was a result of marriage to a man in the Air Force – her travel around America is a result of years of political activism on behalf of issues of social justice.

Starting out life in 1930, in Rutherford, Napa County, Annette Klang was born to a set of loving parents where one (her mother, Victoria Hartman Klang) was a native of San Francisco.  After five years, her family moved to San Francisco where Annette was to finish high school – at the age of sixteen – and move on to college.  When asked about her earlier years, Annette notes that she was born in the year that women finally won the right to vote, and that when she moved to the Richmond District in San Francisco most of it was then comprised of beautiful sand dunes.  She and her older brother, Harold, loved to play in the dunes and enjoyed roller skating to the beach.

Annette remembers herself as being a shy girl, a “bookworm” who loved to read the works of Walt Whitman and Mahatma Gandhi.  Her first career inclination was to become a poet.  She found early inspiration from these writers, and their words later guided her life’s work.  Since she was so young when she completed high school, her parents wanted to keep her close by for college, so Annette went to San Francisco Community College.  She found that she enjoyed geology and fossil field trips to Half Moon Bay.  Upon completing the required course of study in 1030, Annette transferred to the University of California at Berkeley.

It was at Cal Berkeley “where the world really opened up for me…everything interested me!”  She majored in journalism and political science, two subjects which were to prove to be life-long areas of interest. Upon completing her degree in 1943, Annette spent some time teaching and saving money to be able to buy a train ticket to Chicago.  Annette had read about the University of Chicago and the wonderful English programs put in place there by its president, Robert Hutchins.  Her intention was to obtain a masters degree in English, studying the great authors (like Walt Whitman).

Little did Annette realize that the relocation to Chicago was fateful.  While she enjoyed her studies at the University of Chicago, what captured her immediate interest was the work of Saul Alinsky, a noted community organizer.  was active at that time organizing the poorest area of the city called “back of the yards”.  Located behind the malodorous, noisy slaughterhouse stockyards of Chicago, the area was the ghetto home for numerous ethnic groups.  The cultural differences between these groups were exploited by the meat-packing houses, that pitted one group against the other in order to prevent workers from organizing for better working conditions and wages.  But Saul Alinsky changed all that.  In the creation of “The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council”, Alinsky and his group were organizing the area through their churches, community groups, businesses and the unions.  Annette quit school to join in these efforts.  “Walt Whitman wanted to absorb all of life.  Here was a community with so many different kinds of people and cultures.  It interested me.  I wanted to be a part of it.”

After a while, Annette was working for Alinsky, serving as a journalist for the Council’ paper, The Back of the Yards Journal.  During this time, she was also  sent by Alinsky to Washington, D.C. to lobby for the school lunch program and for price controls for meat.  (With World War II raging, meat was scarce and very costly.)  During this period, Annette was also a volunteer for CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), often working in demonstration interracial projects in various Chicago neighborhoods.   This work, with Alinsky and CORE, she enjoyed doing for only a few years.  Only severe illness, a struggle with tuberculosis, was to pull her from this work.  Six months of recovery in a tuberculosis sanitarium was followed by relocation to a less cold and damp place, California.  Back home, Annette’s life went through some more changes.  In 1949 she married a member of the Air Force who was stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County.  She taught school briefly.  But soon her schedule was filled by the demands of raisin a son and later a daughter, both born in Marin.  Her husband’s assignment to different military installations around the world led Annette to live in such places as England and Japan.

Once her children were in high school, Annette, now relocated to Hamilton Air Force Base, decided to return to work.  She found her niche as Education Coordinator for Community Action Marin (CAM).  CAM is the federal anti-poverty agency serving Marin County.  Annette’s work was to support the parents who came to CAM, teaching them how to best help their children in school.  It was a job she loved.  When federal funds were cut, Annette’s job was eliminated.  Other agencies were similarly hurt, leaving many people without helping services.

Novato was a community totally without programs for people living at or below the poverty level.  So, Annette and a group of like-minded citizens got together and formed the Novato Human Needs Center in 1972, introducing a new, broad-based community agency to help those in need.  The Novato Human Needs Center (NHNC) is currently the recognized place foe assistance in the northern part of our county.  Annette served on the NHNC board of directors for many years.

This period also saw Annett face some difficult times with the dissolution of her twenty seven year marriage.  Adding to the trauma of divorce was the knowledge that she would lose all her military medical benefits once the divorce became final.  In the 1970’s, it was very difficult for a 57 year old woman to find medical coverage; and if found, the cost was prohibitive.  Annette tells of a deep depression that settled over her during this period of her life, a time during which she searched anew for her focus.  “In the process of seeking to find myself, I unearthed a number of false assumptions and myths, unnecessary baggage in my psyche.  These I found had contributed much to my depression.  At this time, the feminist movement, with its insights, helped me to overcome many problems. 

When she emerged from this process, she decided to take action on the issue of medical benefits for divorced military wives.  She asked herself, “What would Saul Alinsky do in such a case?” and came up with a plan.

Annette began a media campaign, sending press releases of her situation off to several local and Bay Area newspapers.  A “supermarket tabloid” called the Midnight Globe picked up the story in its July 5, 1977 issue and Smail’s story went nationwide.

Support flooded in as people read about women who gave their lives to the military and then lost everything.  Other women who had been similarly affected by loss of medical coverage due to divorce contacted her.  “They came out of the woodwork!”, Annette claimed.  She remembers many of their stories.  One woman told Smail how she had to quickly get to Letterman Military Hospital and have a hysterectomy before her divorce became final.

Annette founded M.E.D., Medical Equality for Dependents, and set to work organizing the women on a state by state basis.  She developed organizing techniques, media campaigns, letter-writing campaigns, and lobbying efforts.  She worked with local Congressman John Burton.  Burton met with her, studied the issue, and six weeks later wrote legislation to allow divorced military spouses, both men and women, medical benefits rights.  In 1977, when Annette was called to testify in Congress for the bill, she was the only “grassroots” witness.  Her testimony was reported in newspapers throughout the country, inspiring many other women in the same situation to come forward.  When later hearings were held, there were so many more witnesses seeking to testify that the House Armed Services Committee found it difficult to accommodate them all.  Annette also founded the Older Women’s Political Caucus, to also help lobby for the bill’s passage.  In 1979, Annette received the Soroptimist’s “Women Helping Women” Award.

For five years, Annette, Representatives John Burton and Patricia Schroeder (along with many groups that formed to support the legislation) worked on the bill.  Annette traveled all over the United States speaking to groups about the need for this reform by passage of the legislation.   Unfortunately, the Supreme Court provided a setback by ruling in 1980 that military spouses could no longer receive retirement benefits. Rather than stopping Annette and the reform’s supporters, this galvanized an even larger group to work with her to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling.  For her efforts on behalf of the bill, Working Woman magazine named her recipient of the “Working Women Achievement Award” in 1983.  For her determination, Smail received three consecutive commendations from the Marin County Board of Supervisors, in 1983, 84 & 85.  Finally, in 1982, the bill passed with full benefits authorized two years later.  Over one hundred women in Marin County alone immediately benefited.  Thousands were helped nationwide.  She considers the passage of the spousal medical and retirement benefits bill to be the best accomplishment of her life thus far.

        Annette continued her activism in a campaign to reinstitute a Federal Council on Women (FCW).  Most industrialized countries have a high-level policy advisory board working in conjunction with government to oversee legislation to address the social, economic, and political problems and inequities that still face women.  The United States had such a group, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, created by presidential decree in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy.  It was re-authorized through each following presidency through 1980, when President Ronald Reagan refused to continue the Commission’s work.  Exploring all avenues, whether through legislation or executive order, Annette worked tirelessly to have the Federal Council on Women re-instated.  The bill to create a FCW was first introduced by (then) Congresswoman Barbara Boxer in 1986.  (Annette began her work on the FCW in 1984, immediately after her work on the benefits bill ended.)

For her work in advocacy for older women, Annette was appointed delegate to the White House Conference on Aging in 1981.  She also helped to found the Marin County Commission on Aging and served on that commission for seven years.  In 1984, she was appointed to the Lieutenant Governor’s California Task Force on the Feminization of Poverty.  Additional awards Smail received are the 1991 Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award, a Commendation from the California Senate Rules Committee given on her 70^th birthday (in 1990) for her “Outstanding Record of Community Service” and finally a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition in 1991.

Annette has also been behind the movement to pass a California state bill which would mandate that all appointments to statewide panels have a balance of gender and race.  Smail has stated:

          “the government appointment process has not adequately 
                    addressed the goal of fair representation of women and 
                    minorities…a society in which so many of its numbers are excluded 
                    from the political process will be governed in a manner which lacks 
                    balanced and diverse viewpoints.”

Though it passed the legislature in 1990, the California Governor, George Deukmejian, vetoed it claiming (incorrectly) that it was a “quota bill”.  Her efforts to have a similar bill passed under the succeeding Governor met the same fate.  Her determination was undaunted.  She says she is waiting for a governor who won’t veto such a bill.

In 1993, when this biography was prepared, Annette was in her mid-seventies and felt she was slowing down a little. The days of flying around the United States were over, due to the costs in both money and energy.  She has enlisted other people to further the causes she believes in.  She continued to serve on boards of directors for agencies such as Community Action Marin (CAM) and STARS (Single Parent transition Apartment/Resources/Services).  She became a member of the Marin Self-Esteem Task Force and continued as an active member of the National Women’s Political Caucus, representing the Older Women’s Political Caucus.  She remembers with fondness her full life of activism.  When asked what she would what to tell the next generation, especially women, she replied,

 “Keep watching your psyche.” (Know what’s important to you.) 

“Never give in during times of reversals.”

“Keep up with the women’s movement.”

“Keep up your spirits.”