San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Longtime champion of women’s rights
When Libby Cater joined the board of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in 1972, she brought along an Alabama lilt, a quick wit and a backstory that verged on the cinematic.
Under her maiden name of Anderson, she’d been the first female student body president at the University of Alabama. In 1974, that school’s exclusive Anderson Society for academic excellence was created to honor her.
She then became special assistant to first lady Claudia Johnson, which put her front and center on the Lady Bird Special campaign train as it chugged through the South during Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign. Still ahead of her was a position as assistant executive director of the President’s Commission on Women, an appointment by Jimmy Carter.
Cater, who was in the trenches of the fight for women’s liberation in the 1950s right up through 2021, died Jan. 7 at her home in San Rafael. She was 96. The cause of death was old age exacerbated by a fall at the home of her daughter, Morrow Cater. “Wherever she went, my mother inspired women to stand up for their rights,” Morrow Cater said. “She was powerful but charming, Southern sweet but sassy. And very, very funny.”
Cater’s time in the Bay Area lasted several decades, in separate stints, but she made the most of it. First settling in a big brick house in Pacific Heights, her first new friend was a neighbor, Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. She offered him an unused parking slot, and they were soon hosting dinner parties together.
After just a few years in the city, she moved to the Stanford campus, where her husband, S. Douglass Cater, was teaching in the graduate communications program.
While there, she developed a program focused on integrating women into leadership positions at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, a respected think tank. She was the lead author of a 1977 treatise titled “Women and Men: Changing Roles, Relationships and Perspectives.”
“Libby was one of those Southern women who did something the Confederate Army never could: She conquered Washington,” said political commentator Bill Moyers, who knew Cater from both the Johnson White House, where he worked as press secretary, and from the Aspen Institute. “She was determined to be not only a beautiful woman but an intelligent woman who wanted to bring a lot of savvy to policy and politics.” Libby Anderson was born Aug. 2, 1925, in Birmingham, Ala. Her father, Benjamin Payne Anderson, had been wounded in combat in Europe during World War I. Her mother, Margaret Morrow Anderson, grew vegetables and fished to help feed her children. The family was poor, and after graduating from the segregated Phillips High School in Birmingham, Cater attended the University of Alabama on an academic scholarship. In her junior year she was elected vice president of the Student Government Association. The president resigned to serve in World War II, and she was elevated to president.
She learned typing and shorthand, and worked her way through at office jobs, graduated with honors in 1946 with a bachelor’s degree in commerce and business administration.
“The dean of the business told her she was so smart that she would be running a corporation someday,” her daughter saud, “but she’d be doing it as a secretary to the CEO, not as the CEO itself. This rankled her.”
Her first job was in public relations at a Birmingham steel company, but she was quickly recruited to be administrative assistant to Alabama Rep. Laurie Battle in Washington, D.C. She met and married Douglass Cater in Washington, where he was bureau chief of
the Reporter magazine, an influential political periodical.
They were married in 1950. In 1954, when Battle decided to run for Senate, Cater was recruited to run for his office, which could have made her the first female representative from Alabama. But she was pregnant at the time with her first child and declined.
“She said that she didn’t even consider it,” her daughter said. “That was the state of affairs for women at that time.”
The Caters settled in Alexandria, Va., where guests at their dinner parties and impromptu dances included Supreme Court justices, diplomats and elected officials, including then-Senate Majority Leader Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird.
“Libby was smooth, the most gracious and relaxed hostess in the world,” said Judith Moyers, retired CEO of Public Affairs Television, who attended the Caters’ parties with her husband, Bill.
Once Johnson became president, both Caters went to work at the White House. Douglass became special assistant on health education and welfare, and Libby accepted the job as special assistant to the first lady, even though Cater had four young children to raise.
After President Johnson surprised the nation by announcing he would not run for a second term, the Caters left Washington for the Bay Area.
She had served on the board of the Arena Stage, a pioneer in the regional theater movement, in Washington. That got her recruited to the board of ACT, which she served from 1972 to 1976. In addition to that and her own writing for the Aspen Institute, she edited three books written by her husband.
In the early 1980s, Douglass Cater accepted the position of president at Washington College, a redbrick liberal arts school on the shores of eastern Maryland. He died after a bout with lung cancer in 1995, and his widow moved to Washington, D.C., where she connected with Najeeb Halaby, an old friend from the Johnson administration who had also been widowed.
They were married in 1997, an event that made the new Mrs. Halaby stepmother to Queen Noor of Jordan. Halaby died in 2003, and Cater later returned to California to live with her daughter in San Rafael. She was an active public speaker into her 90s.
In 2016, Cater gave her last speech at a Women’s Association event held at St. Luke Presbyterian Church in San Rafael.
“Having transplanted from the harsh reality of Washington, D.C., and its world of politics, it is time to take stock,” she told an audience of a few hundred women and their daughters.
“Stop living in the past and get caught up in the California euphoria of living in the moment. Be alive. Be here, now, today. This is it — make every moment count.”
Cater was predeceased by a son, Douglass Cater Jr., and daughter, Rebecca Sage Cater. Survivors include daughter Morrow Cater of San Rafael, son Benjamin Cater of Fresno, and five grandchildren. Donations in her name may be made to: Ritter Center, P.O. Box 3517, San Rafael, CA 94912, or Marin Shakespeare Company Social Justice Program, P.O. Box 4053, San Rafael, CA 94913.