Vermont Rep. Janet Ancel:
Quietly Making History
By Ginny Sassaman
In an era when women comprise nearly half of all new law school students, embody 25 percent of all federal judges, and hold two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court bench, it might seem ancient history to recall when women “just didn’t” become lawyers.
Yet that was the prevailing view when Janet Ancel graduated from Stanford University in 1967. She’d always been interested in the law, but even she accepted the common wisdom of the time. Women didn’t become lawyers; instead Ancel earned a major in English and American literature, and minored in history and philosophy. She came back home to Montpelier and got a job as a social worker for Vermont’s state hospital in Waterbury.
It was a good job and provided valuable—indeed, life-changing—experience. More on that later.
First, though, it’s worth pausing to consider the gap between then and now. In 2012, not only is Rep. Janet Ancel, D-Calais, a lawyer, but also the first woman in the history of Vermont to chair the important House Ways and Means Committee. Just as important, she notes, and also for the first time ever, all four powerful “money committees” have women at the helm. The other three committees are the House Committee on Appropriation, chaired by Martha Heath; Senate Appropriations, chaired by Jane Kitchel; and Senate Finance, chaired by Ann Cummings.
Janet Ancel is “thrilled” at this development, and certainly pleased that House Speaker Shap Smith appointed her to her current role. As a young woman, it took her a long time to recognize and accept her own ambition. Now she wears her leadership role quite comfortably.
Running Ways and Means
The money committees have different roles. The House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees craft legislation to raise money, while the two Appropriations committees, House and Senate, put forward proposals on how that money will be spent. Because Vermont specifies that all legislation involving fees or taxes must originate in House Ways and Means, the committee is widely seen as very powerful. It is heavily lobbied, and the room is always crowded.
But, laughs Ancel, “I don’t get wined or dined. Everything we do is public.”
Tax writing is serious business. “It’s hard to raise money,” Ancel observes, “because somebody’s got to come up with that money, and you’re always mindful of that.” Therefore, this committee also tends to be fairly conservative.
As leader of this group, Rep. Ancel feels a certain amount of pressure to make sure she doesn’t waste the time of the “10 really smart people” on the committee with her. At the same time, the Ways and Means room is very collegial, with abundant cookies and laughter. It’s all part of working together to build consensus on tough issues.
“There are a lot of voices, and a lot of strong feelings in the room,” Ancel observes. At the same time, these are “great members. Nobody dominates or derails the discussion.”
Ancel appreciates vigorous debate. “We are all stronger if there are articulate and thoughtful arguments on every side of an issue,” she says. “We’ve <definitely lost that at the national level. We’re at danger of losing that at the state level—we still have it, but the danger is there.”
She notes relationships across party lines are still very collegial in Vermont’s capitol building. And she is pleased to see Democrats, Republicans, Progressives, and Independents uniting on committee votes. “On difficult issues,” she says, “people really come together.”
A Broad Perspective
Rep. Ancel looks through a woman's eyes at the decisions Vermont legislators need to make. Sometimes she finds that perspective to be meaningful, sometimes not. Indeed, most legislation that comes before her committee is not gender specific, though two big issues—funding health care reform and funding education—she sees as significant for Vermont women.
Vermont’s health care reform legislation will start in the Health Care Committee. Questions of how to fund it will be worked out in Ways and Means at a later date. As for education, Ancel notes, “Certainly any parent is interested in school funding, because anytime you tweak that situation, you can affect kids.”
Not all of Ancel’s legislative activity is contained within her committee. Three times, she has submitted a bill of particular interest to her and young Vermontwomen—legislation to prohibit teenagers under the age of 18 from using tanning beds in public facilities. Both boys and girls use these tanning beds, but teenage girls are especially high users. Ancel cites Vermont’s high rate of melanoma, and the link between ultraviolet tanning rays and skin cancer.
Although Ancel has been frustrated in her efforts to move this legislation forward in previous years, this year the bill (H.157) has the backing of the Vermont chapter of the American Cancer Society. The ACS says it supports H.157 “due to the link between the use of sun-tanning facilities during the teen years and twenties to an increased risk for skin cancer.”
This may be the year the bill will get the attention it deserves. There’s more buzz than ever before; in just one week in February, three different women came up to Ancel. Each said, “I used tanning beds and now I have cancer. I’d do anything to help.” Rep. Keisha Ram, a 24-year-old on the Ways and Means Committee, told Ancel that she, too, wants to help because “it’s her demographic.”
It is telling that before Ancel initially introduced this bill, she contacted a friend who owns a business with tanning beds to get his perspective. Turns out, he was supportive also—he doesn’t want teens in the tanning beds either.
When she took over leadership of the committee, Rep. Ancel literally changed the viewpoint of the job: she became the first head of Ways and Means to put her chair against the window so she faces the door. This was a small but crucial adjustment, because the committee rooms in Vermont’s beautiful capitol building are quite small. Legislators and visitors squeeze in and out of the door when her committee is meeting. By facing the door, Rep. Ancel has a much better view of the room and everyone in it.
One of Ancel’s greatest strengths is how much effort she puts into really listeningto all viewpoints. A committed Democrat, she nonetheless has watched all the Republican presidential primary debates because she feels a need to understand and to try and be balanced in her own approach. “I don’t think it’s helpful to just tune out and criticize,” she says. Paying close attention to the views of others helps her understand her own thinking better—a process that may well have its roots in her central Vermont childhood.
Transformative Learning
Ancel was quite shy as a child. Though her family had settled Calais hundreds of years before, she was born in Boston and came to Vermont as a toddler after her parents’ marriage ended. Back in Vermont with her siblings and mother Elizabeth Kent, Ancel didn’t quite fit in. A single-parent family was unusual at the time, and in her tiny one-room school in Maple Corner, she was the onlystudent in her grade>.
By 8th grade, she began attending Montpelier High School, which was a major cultural shock. “No way, no way was I prepared, either culturally or educationally,” Ancel remembers.
A few years later came another shock to her system. She went to college in California, at Stanford University where her father, economist Lorie Tarshis, taught. It was a quantum leap of size and culture that left her head spinning. It was also a time of great political and social upheaval in California and the nation.
Her father’s story, which Ancel only learned in full about 15 years ago, is also very interesting. After writing the first Keynesian economic textbook in this country, Lorie Tarshis was vilified by the forces of McCarthyism in the 1940s. Orders for his textbooks were canceled, and Stanford was pressured to get rid of him. But the university remained loyal; Ancel’s father kept his job, and as a result, she went to Stanford as an undergrad.
Certainly she had lots of opportunity to learn there from a wide variety of viewpoints. She flourished academically, but with law school not an option, she came home to Vermont and social work at the state hospital.
There was more learning in store. Social work, it turned out, was not Ancel’s forte—but she did find psychiatric work fascinating. Indeed, the job was transforming, she says. She discovered in herself an ability to stay calm, emotionally courageous, and centered in the midst of chaos. “Going in the locked wards was like a scene out of a 1940’s movie,” she remembers. “You just had to center yourself.”
She vividly remembers one occasion, when the patients were “freaking out” in a scene of bedlam. Her co-worker suggested taking the patients’ hands and bringing them close to calm them down. The tactic worked, and the event became one of the most formative in Ancel’s life. Even today, in the midst of chaos, her instinct is to bring people close and calm them down in order to move forward.
Building a Career
Though she didn’t like social work, Janet headed off to Colorado to get a master's degree in the field. There she realized she wanted something more. She finished school, but a later internship with the Vermont Legislative Council (established in 1971 to provide support services to the entire Legislature) finally taught her what she wanted to do with her life. Ancel loved working for the Legislative Council.
She loved it so much, she went on staff full time, until deciding to return
to Colorado for a law degree. When Ancel was at last an attorney, she went on staff at the Legislative Council again—and stayed there for the next 19 years.
Given her natural inclination to view all sides, as well as her love for the law, it was a perfect fit. The position of Legislative Counsel is completely non-partisan. Ancel appreciated the great value her office provided to the Legislature as an institution. “We armed both sides equally,” she laughs.
Of course, non-partisan does not mean non-political. “Politics is what I do,” says Ancel. “Politics is a good thing. It provides the machinery and organization for expressing points of view. We—Vermont—all gain from that.”
Interestingly, for someone who was living such an intensely political life, Ancel never identified with a political party until she left the Legislative Council to work as legal counsel for Howard Dean’s gubernatorial administration. From that day through today, however, Ancel is clear; she is a solid Democrat.
The Dean years were “wonderful, a total pressure cooker of a job,” says Ancel, who also had teenage sons at the time. “They were great, just terrific kids—and completely unimpressed with my work!”
Running for Herself
After a brief stint as tax commissioner under Governor Jim Douglas, Ancel decided to retire. But when her sister Olivia Gay urged her to run for a seat in the Vermont House of Representatives, Ancel was ready. All the pieces fell into place: the incumbent had left and there was a vacancy; her children were grown; she was at a stage in life when serving in the legislature was fiscally feasible. She was very concerned about health care in Vermont and the number of people without adequate health care insurance, or none.
Ancel took a look at who she was, and what she could offer the citizens of Calais, Marshfield, and Plainfield. In some ways, she remained the shy girl she once was. In quiet moments she wondered how she might feel if she lost the election. “There’s a real vulnerability in politics,” Ancel says about it now. “There will always be some people who won’t agree with you, no matter how good a person you are.”
More a policymaker than a natural politician, Ancel observes that here in Vermont, “elected officials are very, very close to the people we represent . So people who aren’t good politicians can still get elected to office.”
Ancel knew she was a good analytical thinker with a thorough understanding of the legislative process; she believed her democratic values were shared by the community at large. She also had enthusiastic support from her husband Stephen Reynes, himself a veteran of three terms in Vermont’s House and one in the Senate. “Steve,” she says, “knows how to win and how to serve. I could never have done it without him.”
So Ancel took the risk. “It was very exciting—and terrifying!” She raised money, visited every voter she could identify and had materials and yard signs printed up. She worked “really, really hard.” It paid off with a solid victory.
The year 2004 was an exciting one to be a freshman Democrat. The Dems had just taken control of the House, so there were many opportunities. Ancel first got to work on health reform, and then Majority Leader Gaye Symington sent her to Ways and Means to help figure out how to finance the Catamount health plan. Since then, Ancel says, “I’ve been really fortunate in this building. I’ve gotten to do the things I’m good at.”
Today, Rep. Ancel is in her fourth term. She loves to travel, and she feels the tug of needing to spend time with her grandchildren. But she has no plans to step aside just yet, assuming she can continue to be re-elected; she has faced some serious competition, so that’s not a given.
Her husband still has her back. “Steve more than anybody believes the work I do is important,” she reflects. “Two days a week, he comes home early to take care of our dog Andy. That means a lot to me.”
In the meantime, she knows she’s in the right place for now. Asked if she loves being a Representative, and the chair of a tax-writing committee in tough economic times, Ancel answers with a smile, “Some days. Most days I like it a lot.”
Ginny Sassaman is a writer, artist, activist, entrepreneur, and mediator. Her most recent venture is opening The Happiness Paradigm Store and Experience in Maple Corner, Vermont. Read about it at www.happinessparadigm@wordpress.com
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