We are doing it! (Page 2 of 1)

In fact, though her appointment is lauded as a “first for women” achievement, she is cautious not to focus so much attention on her gender.
“I feel it’s important for women to achieve their goals, and from that standpoint, as a woman in a community, I achieved a certain goal that I wanted and I felt good about it,” she says. “So personally, yes, that was important, but professionally, it is more important just to be a good law director.”

Poplin, who graduated with honors from the University of Tennessee in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts and received her law degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1990, began her career in Knoxville as an assistant city attorney shortly after completing her formal education.

Six years later, she was promoted to senior city attorney. It was during this period of her career, she says, she witnessed an incident of sexism she hasn’t forgotten, even today.

During a deposition she attended, the opposing counsel, a man who had practiced law for nearly 30 years, needed a document photocopied.

“He proclaimed, ‘Here, I’ll just have my girl — referring to his assistant — take care of that,” she remembers. “For a moment, I was in shock but then began to wonder how things were when he began practicing law — during the early beginnings of feminism — I couldn’t find it excusable, but I felt better having applied some reasoning to it.” 
In 1998, former-Mayor Victor Ashe named her interim law director, a position she held for less than a year before being named deputy law director. After a brief intermission for private practice, she returned to the city’s law department in 2001 where she’s labored ever since.

Throughout her career, she says, she’s attributed much of her success to a failure: a failure to acknowledge a presence of a “glass ceiling” if ever there was one.

“I don’t feel that I’ve personally encountered this invisible barrier,” she says. “Of course, I may have, but I refused to acknowledge it. I’m stubborn in that sense.”

Part of that may be due to her upbringing. Poplin describes her childhood as Cleaverian, with a working father and stay-at-home mom. She remembers evenings when her father would sit with the newspaper as her mother helped her and her brother with homework.

Her mother told her stories of how women her age went to college, oftentimes, to get their MRS. degree. Her mother also baked, and still bakes, a delicious pie.

Poplin recalls clearing the table after family meals when her father would jokingly say, “That’s woman’s work,” then join in to help with the cleaning while she and her mother shot him glares.

Though she and her mother come from different eras in “women’s lib,” Poplin credits her mother as one of the women she admires most and a role model who has taught her a lot about life in general. She has a jar on her coffee table at home that says “Happiness is Homemade” on it, a lesson she says she learned from her mother and continues to instill in her two children, Kendall and Preston.

“When I was a child, the feminist movement had just taken root, so I was a witness to a true social change throughout my childhood from the role of housekeeping and raising a family to women making a concerted effort to open new doors for themselves in male-dominated businesses,” she says.

Sami Barile,
first female mayor of Morristown

The City of Morristown inaugurated Sami Barile the first female mayor May 7, 2007. She was sworn into office with two Bibles – one that belonged to her father, who was a Methodist minister, and another her mother received when she was confirmed.

“By using both, I had ‘with’ me both of the people most influential in my becoming who I am,” she says.

She thanks both her parents for supporting her and her two sisters in their education, despite the fact that she had few female role models with full-time careers — and when she did see women with jobs, they were usually teachers, nurses and secretaries.