A while back, a reporter asked me how networking had changed over the years. It didn’t take long till I was “lost in the 80's. Oh my, I wish you could have been there...that decade was a time of emergence for women. More of the major films of the 1980s had women playing the leading roles, including "Terms of Endearment," "Out of Africa," and "Driving Miss Daisy." However, most movies still had MALE heroes. On television, we there were more women playing the lead, like "Murder, She Wrote," "Roseanne," and "The Golden Girls." It was cool! These were strong, independent, capable and out-spoken female leads. Women no longer were portrayed as cute, young sex symbols, as they had been on "Charlie's Angels," or stupid like Edith in "All in the Family". Instead, women could be overweight, middle aged, or even elderly - REAL women.
In politics, Pat Schroeder was in the US House of Representatives, and in 1984 Geraldine Ferraro was running for VP alongside Walter Mondale. We were slowly going from invisible to visible.
In the workplace, things hadn't changed much in decades. As in the past, most of the women who received a college education majored in the fields of education, social work, nursing and library science. Women were largely pigeon-holed into "traditional" female occupations such as clerical positions, factory work, retail sales, service jobs, secretaries, bookkeepers, typists, librarians, waitresses, cooks, hospital attendants, cleaning women and hairdressers. Rarely were they in a position of authority - no power and no respect.
But women still made over half of the purchases for their families, and they influenced over 80% of the purchases, so we had a lot of unorganized potential power. And in the 80's as today, WOMEN do business with people they know.
There were only a few areas where women could make a lot of money and have control of their lives: direct sales, Real Estate and as entrepreneurs.
Nancy Valentine was one of those entrepreneurs. Nancy's husband Paul was a successful attorney when they moved to Fort Collins in the 70's. Nancy's friends were women she knew from the country club, her bridge group, and the wives of her husband's colleagues. But Nancy wanted more. She saw a need and an opportunity, and around 1975 she started Career Connections. She was frustrated the women were pigeon-holed into those "traditional" jobs, unable to reach their full economic potential. So she did what women always do: she got together with her girlfriends and said, "Let's do something about this." In creating a career counseling/job placement service, she opened new doors for hundreds of women.
The problem was that women were excluded and locked out of the usual places and organizations where people got to know each other. Most services clubs were still BOYS ONLY. Maybe us girls got to form an auxiliary, but we were still making coffee and baking cookies. We didn't play golf - the EWGA didn't exist and the FC Country club didn't even have a locker room for women.
Nancy understood that women also needed opportunities to gather and share resources. “Networking” was a relatively new concept. But it didn’t take long till she created the Fort Collins Women’s Network, around the same time she created her career/job placement service.
I came across FCWN in the 1984. At that time, I was a professional photographer, writing for publication and just beginning my career as a Personal Promotion Marketing Specialist. My clients were overwhelmingly female. I loved Nancy’s group, and met many of our COWOI Founding Members at her events: Barbara Johnson and Paula Thomas will echo the fun we had! Nancy’s events were always high-energy, with interesting speakers and lots of opportunities to swap biz cards.
Nancy & I had many conversations about her vision and how she made it a reality, as well as when she realized it was time to “pass the torch.” She launched FCWN in 1975 with 12 members, and when she passed it on the Sharon Roberts in 1999, she had 150 members.
As in all lives, eventually retirement held great appeal, and after selling her businesses, Nancy and Paul bought a big motor home and set off to visit the places they’d dreamed of. I lost touch of her after that, but I’m sure they had great adventures on the road.
We have a lot to thank Nancy Valentine for. What a visionary woman she was! All our wonderful networking groups were rooted, inspired and encouraged by FCWN. There is no doubt that if she still lived here, she would have been in our spotlight as a Woman of Vision Honoree. Thank you, Nancy Valentine!
