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Christine Palm: Advocate for Women

Here’s a bit of mathematics: Create an equation where $1 equals no more than 79 cents. Christine Palm knows exactly how to do that arithmetic. Christine, a Chester resident, is the director of communications for the Connecticut General Assembly’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW), and she points out that for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns on average 79 cents. That, she adds, is an improvement. Several decades ago the figure was for every dollar earned by a man, a woman earned some 50 cents.

Christine will be giving a talk, Women’s Rights: How far We’ve Come, and What’s Left to be Done, at the Essex Library on Wednesday, April 6 as part of the library’s Uncommon Heroes programs.

According to Christine, the PCSW, formed in l973, works in areas as diverse as advocating for women’s pay equity, health and economic security, and increased access to leadership positions in business and government. The commission also advises the General Assembly on the impact of proposed legislation on women’s issues.

Christine’s work as communications director involves not only written communication but also public speaking to audiences from the General Assembly to college and high school students, both male and female.

“We can’t disassociate women’s lives from everyone’s lives,” she explains.

At the moment, according to Christine, one of the areas that the PCSW is interested in is paid family and medical leave in Connecticut. The state currently allows for such leave, but only without pay.

“This is not just an issue for women, but an issue for everybody,” Christine says. “Every family confronts serious illness and people need time off to deal with it without losing income.”

Still, she points out that often women are the ones who leave work for such caregiving situations.

“When you combine the fact that women take time off with the fact that they earn less to begin with, they end up with far fewer assets and can be far more impoverished in old age,” she says.

According to Christine, the commission is also looking into topics regularly in the current news cycle, like sex trafficking of young women in Connecticut, and affirmative consent in campus sexual encounters.

“We’ve gone from ‘No means No’ to ‘Yes means Yes,’” Christine says. “There has to be an affirmative indication that both people want it.”

Affirmative consent, she points out, is a challenging area, particularly if a woman is afraid of physical intimidation or is inebriated. For incidents involving college students, enforcement in such areas, she points out is initially the responsibility of the college or university and its student code of conduct.

Christine is well-prepared as a point person for a group with such a large purview. She has also spearheaded a committee to rescue a duckpin bowling alley in Hartford and taught poetry at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, which two of her sons attended. The bowling alley, which the community group ran for six years, was designed to keep that local business from closing. And it too had a family connection. Christine’s sons, among many local children, had celebrated birthdays at the alley.

At the time of the bowling alley project, Christine was editor of a local Hartford newspaper, The West End News. The community group kept the alley going for six years and then sold it to a private company—and it is still a bowling alley. How many sons in all? Christine and her husband James Baker, an artist, have four.

Christine started at college thinking she might be a marine biologist. The summer of her freshman year she got a job as a copy girl at the old Hartford Times. (In the days before pushing a computer button sent your story to the editor, you shouted out “copy” and a copy girl or boy ran it to the editor’s desk.) Bitten by the newspaper bug, she didn’t go back to college. She became a reporter, working not only at the Hartford Times, but also the Hartford Advocate and The Hartford Courant.

Years later, she did go back to college, but this time for poetry, writing her thesis on six New England modernist poets, among them Wallace Stevens of Hartford and James Merrill of Stonington, and ways to teach their poetry to students. She has loved Wallace Stevens since her sophomore year of high school, when a teacher introduced her to Steven’s poem, “Emperor of Ice Cream.” She particularly loved the line, “In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.”

“I was hooked, a Wallace Stevens fan, after I heard that concupiscent curds,” she says.

But she understands Stevens may not be everybody’s cup of curds. She is on the board of a group called Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens.

“Not everyone loves Wallace Stevens,” she says.

Christine also writes poetry herself and has read from her works at the poetry festival organized annually in Chester. She admits that she loves the very thing that many English classes convince students to hate: grammar.

“I am a grammar freak,” she says, but just as she has developed ways of teaching poetry, she has also made grammar palatable. “I’ve found ways to make kids respond to it,” she says.

Five years ago, Christine and her husband moved from Hartford to Chester. She solves the monotony of the daily commute to Hartford with a computer music service and recorded books.

“We didn’t want to wait to do this until our retirement years,” she says of the move.

Now she can indulge her passion for gardening.

“I love movement, but I hate yoga. Gardening is my yoga,” she explains. “I come in with bug bites, clawed to death; I look a fright, like something out of the Lord of the Flies, but I feel happy. Gardening is my Zen.”

Women’s Rights: How Far We’ve Come and What’s Left to be Done

Talk by Christine Palm, director of communication for Connecticut’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women at the Essex Library on Wednesday, April 6 at 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public; call 860-767-1560 for reservations.