Advocate for social justice dies at 97

Vivian Winston – co-founder of the Women Helping Women Fund – married into one of Spokane’s pioneer families and then became a pioneer herself, championing social justice issues for women, children and people living in poverty. She died Friday at age 97.

“Love is something you do, not just something you say. She said it over and over again,” said Winston’s daughter, Karen Winston, of Spokane.

“People thought she was this sweet little lady – and she was – but she had a backbone of steel,” said Winston’s best friend, Mari Clack, who along with Winston founded the Women Helping Women Fund in Spokane in the early 1990s.

Winston is probably best known now for the fund, which has raised more than $3 million for 256 programs since its inception 16 years ago. But Women Helping Women was just the culmination of a lifetime of service and vision.

Winston was born in Spokane on June 6, 1911, but grew up in Seattle. She was the daughter of an accountant father and a mother who worked in child welfare during the Great Depression. The stories Winston’s mother told of hungry, unwanted and abused children planted the seeds of Winston’s later social justice work. Early on, she demonstrated the courage to follow her own vision, despite societal pressures to do otherwise.

“Young Vivian, independent, ambitious and determined not to get married, enrolled at the University of Washington to become a doctor,” reported Julie Sullivan in a 1995 Spokesman-Review profile of Winston. But money was short, and after graduation, Winston went to work at the state Department of Labor and Industries, where she met “a much sought-after attorney who was writing the new state highway code.”

That young attorney was Patrick Henry Winston, born into a prominent Spokane family. He was the grandson of Col. Patrick Henry Winston, a politician, lawyer and journalist who wielded power and influence in the late 1800s in Spokane.

On March 22, 1937, Winston’s engagement was big news. A Spokane Chronicle article read: “Of wide interest in Spokane is announcement today of the engagement of Miss Vivian Downey, Seattle, to Patrick Henry Winston IV … a member of one of the best known and most prominent families of Spokane.”

The young couple moved to Washington, D.C., while Patrick worked for the Selective Service and rose to the rank of captain in the U.S. Navy. After World War II, the couple chose to settle in Spokane. In that 1995 profile Winston recalled that her friends said: “You won’t like it. There’s not a liberal thought in the town.”

Spokane of the 1950s and 1960s was brimming with social opportunities for women of Winston’s stature. She had married into a pioneer family, after all, and her husband later founded one of Spokane’s premier law firms, Winston and Cashatt.

But instead of focusing on high society doings, Winston focused on social justice work, long before it was trendy.

She was an early advocate for foster children, programs for runaway teens, and adoption programs for special-needs children, and she gave inspiring talks to women participating in programs helping them transition from welfare to education and work.

“We can’t let those who are unable to make it themselves just fall through the cracks in our system,” Winston said in a 1985 interview with Spokesman-Review columnist Dorothy Powers. “We need to help every kind of child. We need to remember that these children are going to be part of our world, whether we like their behavior or not, and we need to help them as much as possible.”

In 1985, she was named to the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board. Mari Clack was working for Gov. Booth Gardner then and had just made the case for appointing a young person to the board. But when Gardner said, “I want Vivian Winston. She’s the smartest person,” Clack heartily endorsed her.

“Vivian is 74 in age, not in mind,” Clack told the governor. On that board, Winston became a prime mover behind an idea for a University District in the core of Spokane, an idea that is becoming reality with each new building and program added there every year.

She was a member of Spokane’s chapter of the League of Women Voters from its inception in 1948, as well as the first female president of Spokane’s United Way in 1969.

Winston’s status in Spokane society and its civic groups did not shield her from controversy.

She and a handful of others founded Planned Parenthood of Spokane more than 35 years ago. Criticism of the agency dogged it from its earliest days, but Winston never regretted her involvement, and in the agency’s early days “even dispensed birth control information from behind a borrowed desk,” according to the 1995 profile.

As Clack remembered: “She always said, ‘You don’t just say that something sounds like a good idea. You ask why is it worth fighting for?’ So she asked herself: ‘What makes it worthwhile to go for a Planned Parenthood in such a conservative town?’ ”

At lunch one day in the early 1990s, Clack, Winston and four other women brainstormed the vision that evolved into Women Helping Women. Clack remembers Vivian saying: “Should we do this today? My husband founded a law firm. Let’s go over there right now and incorporate.” They did.

At these early luncheons, women were asked to pony up $100, an amount that far surpassed what women were used to giving at Spokane fundraisers. Now $100 donations are the routine “ask” at most women’s fundraisers in Spokane. Women gave big those first years and continue to do so. Women Helping Women gives a scholarship in Winston’s honor each year.

Winston also did her work in quiet ways. For instance, on Christmas, she’d call Gonzaga University and see if there was anyone alone there who would enjoy a holiday dinner. She was active well into her 80s, taking college courses and caring for her husband as he developed the Alzheimer’s disease that contributed to his death in 1996.

She slowed down in her 90s, but her daughter, Karen Winston, said she enjoyed living in the Waterford retirement community, even as her memories slipped away and her body grew more frail. She died, finally, “from old age,” Winston said, leaving behind the legacy of service to her family and community.

“My kids now hear that ‘Love is something you do,’ ” Winston said. “They hear it over and over again.”

Vivian Winston is survived by two daughters, a sister, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Her memorial service is scheduled for March 28 at 10 a.m. at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church on Spokane’s South Side.