Getting Political: Stories of a Woman Mayor
by Joan Darrah, Alice Crozier
Category: History

At the age of fifty-four, Joan Darrah was elected mayor of Stockton, California, a city of a quarter of a million people located in the middle of California's huge Central Valley. She had never held elective office. She had not even been to many city council meetings before she declared her candidacy. The product of a conservative business family, the sorority scene at the University of California, Berkeley, and the somewhat genteel world of Junior Aid and the United Way, Darrah, a committed Democrat, soon discovered she would have to master the confrontational ways of politicians and learn to maneuver among the competing pressure groups that throw their weight around in city governments if she were to function as an effective mayor. The learning curve was not without bumps. Early on a newspaper headline labeled her a racist, city council politics provoked the city manager's resignation, and frightening homophobic rhetoric filled the council's chambers after Darrah voiced support of a Stockton gay pride march. Darrah eventually discovered that "one of the hardest tasks of practical politics is that of choosing those issues on which principle needs to yield to expediency if the politician is to remain viable and live to fight another day." In the end, Darrah's two terms as Stockton's mayor spanned a pivotal period in the city's history. A period in which the city began to change from a scandal-racked, crime-ridden municipality with a rotting downtown core to one where city leadership is respected, the streets safer, and the downtown area has been launched on a journey of revitalization.