Women and the ’88 Elections

By Sharron Hannon

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 1-3

What role will women play in the ’88 elections? Will the “gender gap” resurface? Will it affect the outcome of the presidential race?

These are questions that candidates and political analysts might well be pondering in the next several wasks, as Super Tuesday–the March 8 date when primaries and caucuses will be held in twenty states, mostly in the South–looms large on the horizon.

To help focus their attention, the National Women’s Political Caucus gathered representatives from the presidential campaigns, political consultants, pollsters and journalists for a day-long conference in Atlanta in December.

The purpose of the meeting, according to NWPC chair Irene Natividad, was to “underscore the obvious”–the fact that women make up a majority of voters in this country. In 1988, ten million more women than men will be eligible to vote.

Women’s groups worry that these numbers are being either overlooked or deliberately ignored by the candidates.

“They act like they’re afraid of the ‘w’ word–women,” says Natividad. “The omission of women from campaign rhetoric so far has been the norm rather than the exception. Why don’t they target the largest clump of voters? Why is something so obvious being so intensely ignored?”

The silence is particularly evident in Super Tuesday states, she notes, where candidates seem to be focusing instead on “Rhett Butler–the white male in the South.”

This is not a winning strategy, according to participants at the Atlanta meeting. They contend that the key to Super Tuesday is to find a message that will resonate

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among women and minorities.

To bolster the point, presenters at the conference deluged the audience with statistics on voting patterns in the ’80, ’84 end ’86 elections. For example:

• In 1980, for the first time since women won the right to vote in 1920, the same percentage of women voted as men (59 percent). Because more women than men are eligible to vote (since women live longer and form a larger percentage of the population), this meant that six million more women than men voted.
• Also in 1980, polling data revealed that women were thinking and voting differently from men on a wide range of issues including national security, the economy, the environment and education, as well as women’s rights issues. The “gender gap” was born, and has continued to manifest itself during subsequent elections and polling on a variety of issue areas.
• By 1984, leaders of seventy-six national women’s organizations had banded together for a registration, education and get-out-the-vote drive. The Women’s Vote Project aimed to register one and a half million new women voters from among the thirty million eligible but unregistered female population. The goal was exceeded, with more than 1.8 million women registered, and the post-election Census Bureau report confirmed a significant increase: 61 percent of all eligible women voted–a 2 percent increase from 1980 and 2 percent higher than men, whose level remained at 59 percent. Seven million more women than men voted.
• In 1986, women’s votes (in combination with votes by minorities in some cases) provided the winning edge in nine key Senate races–five of these in Southern states. The beneficiaries were all Democrats and include John Breaux (L Louisiana), Wyche Fowler (Georgia), Bob Graham (Florida), Terry Sanford (North Carolina) and Richard Shelby (Alabama). Women voted in greater numbers than men in all twenty Super Tuesday states.

While these statistics point to potential political clout for women, the operative word here is potential. Some political pundits are still inclined to write off the gender gap, pointing out that it failed to defeat Ronald Reagan in ’84.

Activist women’s groups acknowledge that the women’s vote is not monolithic. Race, age, income and education level are among the factors other than sex that figure into voting patterns. Still, they bristle at being labeled a “special interest” group.

“We are here to remind the candidates that we are not a special interest; we are more than half the population,” said Missouri Lt. Gov. Harriett Woods, echoing the sentiments of many at the NWPC gathering in Atlanta.

Woods attended the meeting both as an NWPC member and as a representative of Democratic presidential candidate Richard Gephardt (she is co-chair of the campaign for her fellow Missourian). All six Democratic candidates sent stand-ins, though only Bob Dole was represented on the Republican side. And each, in turn, was given an opportunity to make a pitch for her candidate.

In addition, the NWPC’s Democratic and Republican task forces released reports on the candidates, covering not only where they stand on such issues as ERA, choice, child care and pay equity, but also data on how many women are on their campaign staffs and what their positions and I salaries are. “Equal opportunity cannot begin after the election,” said Ann Lewis, chair of the Democratic task force and former executive director of Americans for Democratic Action.

Not surprisingly, the Democratic candidates all ranked considerably better than their Republican counterparts on support of the issues, with Jesse Jackson, Michael Dukakis and Paul Simon rated as the strongest backers of women’s rights in the task force reports.

Perhaps surprisingly, women are well-represented on the campaign and office staffs of nearly all the candidates (information on Pat Robertson and Alexander Haig was not available for the reports). Women hold close to half of the positions overall and their salaries are competitive with men on the staffs.

The highest ranking woman is Susan Estrich, Dukakis’s campaign manager. She is the first woman in history to run a major presidential campaign. Women in the Dukakis campaign hold twenty-seven of the top forty-nine paid positions.

“We’re running the darn thing,” Deputy Political Director Alice Travis, an active NWPC member, told her colleagues in Atlanta. “We’re in charge at last and how sweet it is.”

The Democratic task force report also notes endorsements from prominent women. Again Dukakis fares particularly well, with support from Gov. Madeleine Kunin of Vermont, Lt. Gov. Evelyn Murphy of Massachusetts, Secretary of State Elaine Baxter of Iowa, former New York City’ councilperson Carol Bellamy, and more than one hundred

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female state legislators from twenty-two states.

While endorsements and the placement of women on their staffs may help candidates attract women to their campaigns, neither is necessarily enough in itself

“It’a great to have women in high positions, but what about the rest of us?” asked a Florida NWPC member who had recently attended her state Democratic convention. “I went to each candidate there and not one had a piece of literature with them that spoke to women’s issues.”

Harriett Woods, co-chair for Gephardt, defends the candidates from the charge that they are not speaking to women.

“In the debates so far, no one has asked the right questions,” she says. “The dialogue has been controlled by the interviewers.”

Still, she acknowledges a need to get the candidates to put forth such issues as child care–which polls show to be an overwhelming concern among women.

The candidates will receive more than a little nudge in this direction in January. First, U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder will launch a “Great American Family Tour” on the 1 7th with funds raised during her exploratory campaign for president. Along with pediatrician-author T. Berry Brazelton and “Family Ties” producer Gary David Goldberg, she will travel to Portsmouth, N.H., four Southern cities, and Iowa to talk about the parental leave bill which she is currently sponsoring in Congress.

Schroeder’s aim is to get this and other “family issues” into the forefront of political debate.

“Everything we used to call women’s issues are really family issues,” she notes. “If you’re shortchanging women, you’re shortchanging everybody.”

Next, from Jan. 22-24, more than thirty women’s organizations will sponsor a “Women’s Agenda Conference” in Des Moines, two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. The presidential candidates have been invited to speak on child care, pay equity and other issues. The conference was initiated by the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (BPW), a group that has rarely been involved in national politics.

Executive director Linda C. Dorian describes BPW as “a sleeping elephant that’s getting roused up”–an interesting metaphor since 54 percent of the group’s members identify themselves as Republicans.

Another road show–the “Feminization of Power Campaign” run by Eleanor Smeal, former president of the National Organization for Women–will continue on its nationwide tour with stops in Georgia and Florida planned for early ’88. Launched last October, the tour has already traveled to Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Raleigh, drumming up feminist candidates to run for office at all levels.

A special feature of the tour’s rallies is a request for each person in attendance to take a pledge “not to work for, nor support with my vote, money or time, any candidate who does not support and work for women’s rights and feminist principles.”

To help evaluate candidates, the Fund for the Feminist Majority, which is sponsoring the Feminization of Power tour, has created a pamphlet outlining “The National Feminist Agenda.” The agenda is an updated and condensed form of the “Plan of Action” drawn up at the 1977 National Women’s Conference held in Houston.

At the NWPC meeting in Atlanta there was also talk of putting together a women’s agenda to submit to the Democratic National Committee in response to Chairman Paul Kirk’s proposal for a shortened party platform for ’88.

Women at the meeting viewed the proposal as yet another attempt to sidestep issues.

“It’s the same thing he has been doing all along, which is to dance away from what he considers the special interest issues that have hurt the Democratic Party,” said Irene Natividad. “It’s unfortunate because I think this election is the Democrats’ to win or lose.”

Various polls show that the Democratic Party holds a slight edge among women. According to a “Southern Primary Poll” conducted for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 56 percent of those intending to vote in the Democratic primary are women.

But polls also show that women, in greater numbers than men, are still window-shopping when it comes to the presidential race.

“If the candidates’ melanges are on the mark,” asks Natividad, “why are most women voters voting for a candidate called ‘undecided’?”

Sharron Hannon is a Georgia-based freelance writer, whose work has appeared in numerous publications. For the past four years, she has edited Southern Feminist, a newspaper covering women’s rights issues.

Women and the Constitution

By Sharron Hannon

Vol. 10, No. 2, 1988, pp. 1-3

In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote husband John, importuning him to “remember the Ladies” in drafting the code of laws of the new nation.

However, the “ladies” were not remembered by the founding fathers. Eleven years after Abigail Adams’s letter, the framers of the Constitution drafted a document beginning, “We the people.” What they meant was, “We the men.” In 1787, women were not considered even three-fifths of a person, as male slaves were. Women were disfranchised and largely invisible in public life. It would take more than a hundred years of struggle to get the U.S. Constitution amended to allow women to vote; an amendment stating that women have equal rights with men has yet to be added, despite more than sixty years of trying.

In the fall of 1986, as preparations got underway for celebrating the bicentennial of the Constitution, a group of women approached former first lady Rosalynn Carter with the idea for a symposium that would “remember the ladies.” She lent her support and so, in February 1988, an overflow crowd of 1,500 women from every state and ten foreign countries gathered in Atlanta to study and discuss and call attention to the founding fathers’ omissions.

“Women and the Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective” was sponsored by the Carter Center of Emory University in conjunction with the Carter Presidential Library and Georgia State University. Rosalynn Carter asked three former first ladies-Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford and Pat Nixon-to join her as convenors of the symposium. All agreed, although health problems prevented the latter two from actually attending the conference.

Nancy Reagan was also invited to be a convenor. She declined-understandably. For while attempts were

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made to keep the conference scholarly and non-partisan, there was no way to avoid comparisons of women’s generally forward progress during preceding administrations and the retrenchment that has followed during the Reagan years. It was similarly impossible not to wonder what a change in White House tenants may mean for the future of issues like the Equal Rights Amendment, which was defeated three states short of ratification in 1982.

“We’ve become comfortable with our prejudices,” noted Rosalynn Carter in a pre-symposium press conference. “We need to be inspired to make our country better. I hope that’s something the next election can do.”

Though none of the presidential candidates attended the symposium (being busy campaigning in New Hampshire at the time), the organizers no doubt hoped to catch their attention by scheduling the event less than a month before Super Tuesday. They at least caught the attention of the media: 150 reporters and radio and TV people swarmed around the hotel where the conference was held-a surprisingly large number for a conference on women.

But then there were some big drawing cards: Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and former Vice-Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Their presence drew attention to how far women have come since 1870, when Myra Bradwell was denied a license to practice law because she was a woman, and 1872, when Susan B. Anthony was arrested for trying to vote.

Women still have a long way to go, however. As Coretta Scott King noted in her address to conference participants, if black women were represented in Congress in proportion to their numbers in the general population, there would be

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thirty black women in the U.S. House of Representatives and seven Senators. Instead, there is only one black woman in Congress: Rep. Cardiss Collins of Illinois.

Many conference speakers pushed for women’s increased involvement in politics, both as voters and candidates. “If you don’t run, you can’t win,” was the theme of Ferraro’s speech.

Former U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug had a unique idea for speeding up women’s access to political power. “Let’s ask both parties to commit all open seats to women until some measure of equity is reached,” she suggested during the closing plenary. “Let’s ask that one Senator of the two from each state be female. Why not?”

Other speakers looked at the judicial system as an arena for advancing women’s rights, pointing out that it wasn’t until 1971 that the Supreme Court used the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to find sex discrimination unconstitutional. Since then, more than fifty cases have been heard by the Court relating to hiring, promotions, maternity leave, disability insurance, pension rights and seniority.

“Not all such challenges have been successful,” noted Justice O’Connor in her keynote speech. “But there is no question that the Court has now made clear that it will no longer view as benign archaic and stereotypic notions concerning the roles and abilities of males and females.”

In the l980s, however, the number of sex discrimination cases being heard has declined. “There are not a lot of Fourteenth Amendment cases left to bring,” said Isabelle Pinzler, director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, in a panel discussion with other attorneys on the role of advocacy in promoting women’s rights. “Without the ERA, there won’t be much change.”

Another drawback to progress through the courts was raised by former EEOC chair Eleanor Holmes Norton: “We must depend on the generosity of a largely male judiciary.”

This is especially true of federal courts. Since 1981, President Reagan has filled 334 seats on the federal bench-and only twenty-seven of his appointees have been female.

So what about the Equal Rights Amendment? It was the topic of both a mini-plenary (“ERA: Was It Worth It?”) and a panel discussion (“Putting Women in the Constitution: The Future of the ERA”), and it was obvious from both sessions that there is no consensus on the future of the struggle for ratification.

There is not even consensus on the past. Some regard the 1972-1982 period of national focus on the ERA as the finest hour of the women’s movement.

“Never have women learned so much and moved so fast,” said panelist Erma Bombeck, who spent a year traveling with former White House Press Secretary Liz Carpenter to lobby in unratified states.

Others, however, resented what political scientist Janet Bowles termed the “artificial consensus” to make the ERA the centerpiece of the women’s movement. “The demise of the ERA gave feminists freedom to reassess other goals,” she said.

Eleanor Smeal, who as president of the National Organization for Women was the strategist behind the ERA Countdown Campaign, was unwilling to pause to argue the past.

“We must go forward,” she said. “The drive for total equality is still so needed. Statutes can be reversed. Executive orders overturned. What we knew then intellectually, we now know through experience-we need a constitutional guarantee.”

NOW, in fact, has already launched a drive for “the new ERA” and activists were busy circulating petitions among the conference participants. It was the only active organizing visible-a fact that troubled some.

“It doesn’t make sense to spend these resources and gather this talent without using it as a stepping stone,” said Margie Pitts Hames, an Atlanta attorney who argued Doe v. Bolton, the companion case to Roe v. Wade, which established the right to abortion in 1973. “I see no agenda, no plan, no direction. We’ll go back to our various places without mobilizing the energy I feel here.”

Hames and others had hoped the conference might at least generate some resolutions. And they were further disappointed by what they perceived as a decision to avoid issues like abortion rights, homelessness and the feminization of poverty, which were not directly addressed in any of the thirty-one panels or five mini-plenaries.

But the goals of the conference were academic, not activist; focused, not broad. What the organizers aimed to produce was not resolutions and a plan of action, but some serious scholarship on the conference topic which will be disseminated through various professional journals and through a secondary school curriculum being developed in conjunction with the Carter Center.

The research generated by the conference as well as audio and video tapes of the proceedings will be maintained by the Carter Center and the National Archives. Georgia Public Television is also putting together a documentary on the conference which will be shown on PBS stations nationwide.

For most conference participants, the best part was just being there-in one place at one time-with women who have been Cabinet members and served in Congress, who have argued or been plaintiffs in landmark court cases, who are deans of law schools and college presidents.

“It was a real high to literally rub elbows with so many incredible women,” said Heather Kleiner, who is working to revitalize the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Georgia.

It was impossible to come away from such a gathering not feeling empowered and energized. “This conference is a kind of political chicken soup,” noted Bella Abzug. “It helps you get out of bed in the morning and say, ‘I can conquer the day.'”.

Sharron Hannon is a Georgia-based freelancer who writes frequently on women’s rights issues.

Women and the Civil Rights Movement: Roles Too Long Unexamined

By Sharron Hannon

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 4-5

The year 1988 wee a time for looking back. Twenty-five years ago a church was bombed in Birmingham, thousands marched on Washington and the President was shot in Dallas. Twenty years ago, assassins’ bullets felled Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. These are not happy anniversaries in our nation’s history but they must be marked.

“Those who cannot remember the peat are condemned to repeat it,” said philosopher George Santayana. That’s motivation enough to look back. But there are other compelling reasons.

We look back because history is cyclical and because you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. We look back, too, because we are disillusioned with the present. How did we get here, in this poet-Reagan era, about to install George Bush as our President far the next four years? What wrong turn did we take and when?

By searching the peat perhaps we’ll find pieces of the puzzle that we need to make sense of the world and our lives today.

But that will only tee possible if we look in the right places and ask the right questions. And we don’t do that. No, twenty-five years later, the burning unanswered question from the Sixties (to judge by the number of prime-time TV specials) is whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Meanwhile, who is exploring what makes men and women put aside personal concerns for the collective goof, as so many civilrights activists did back then? Who is trying to figure out what confluence of personalities or events produced such a readiness for social action in the Sixties?

Fortunately, these questions aren’t being altogether ignored. In Atlanta in 1988, two conferences were held which explored such topics while providing a generous dose of the “herstory” of the civil rights movement. The first conference was sponsored by the Carter Center last February, the second by the King Center in October. Georgia State University co-sponsored both.

What’a the difference between history and herstory? A lot. The former focuses on the headlines, the big events, the men out in front of the crowds. The latter looks at the day-to-day workings of people’s lives, the behind-the-scene activities that produced the big events, and the women who, unheralded, carried them out.

The Carter Center conference was titled: “Women and the Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective” and was wideranging in its scope. But an underlying theme was the interconnectedness of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. Coretta Scott King spoke on “The Civil Rights Movement’s Impact on Women’s Rights,” while Mary King tied the package together during the closing session. I sat in the audience with a friend from the University of Georgia, a well-read woman who works in women’s studies. During Mary King’a speech, she leaned over to me and said, “This woman is amazing! I can’t believe I’ve never heard of her before.” Ah, if only we knew more herstory. If only every school child in America grew up with stories of amazing’ women. Instead, we get these stories in bits and pieces–if at all. And we have to put the pieces together ourselves. I’ve been collecting pieces of the puzzle for ten years since moving to the South and getting actively involved in the women’s movement.

I started the search incredibly ignorant, having passed the summer of ’63 in sheer oblivion to national events. I was l6 years-old, had just gotten my driver’s license and had little else on my mind. Perhaps the images of marchers and police with dogs and fire hoses flickered past on our TV screen in a suburban Boston town, but I don’t remember them. It wasn’t until I was in college that I began to catch up with the civil rights movement.

The year was 1968 and I was attending Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., not exactly a hotbed of activity. But few campuses were untouched by the times. That spring the black students at Purdue–every last one of them, I believe, even the football players–marched to the administration building with bricks in hand. There they presented a fiat of demands and unfurled a banner reading, “Or the fire next time.”

It wee a powerful demonstration and as a wide-eyed reporter for the campus paper, I was significantly impressed. Especially by the fact that it had been largely organized by a female student, Linda Jo Mitchell.

Among the demands presented that day was a need for courses in Afro-American studies, and so it happened that the next fall Linda Jo Mitchell came to be teaching a course’ labeled Industrial Management 590A. The course had absolutely nothing to do with industrial management, met at night and was discontinued after one semester. But what a semester that was! Our class was composed of students and a few professors as well, and was integrated by sex, race and age. We read James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and had hot and heavy discussions that lasted well past our scheduled hour.

What I didn’t notice at the time was that all these authors were men. It wasn’t until almost twenty years later that I learned about women like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and the significant roles they played in those times. At the King Center conference, titled “Trailblazers and Torchbearers: Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” one participant noted: “This conference has done something I didn’t know needed to be done. Using the lens of memory, I look back and see women.”

Overlooking women in history is a shame. It denies half the population role models of courage. But it does more damage than that. It clouds our understanding of how things come to be. For when we overlook women, we overlook grassroots activism. And then we begin to think that the only way things happen is from the top down. And we sit and wait for a leader to come along and change things, relieved of the responsibility of doing anything ourselves. That’s not the lesson we should be taking from the Sixties.

I left both Atlanta women’s conferences inspired to take action. And with Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March, the time seems ripe: Let’s share stories of the women of the civil rights movement and learn from them. Fortunately, some of these women have been telling their stories lately. Does your local library have a copy of Mary King’s Freedom Song, (Quill, 1987) or JoAnn Robinson’s The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, (University of Tennessee Press, 1987). If not, ask them to order these two intriguing memoirs.

Tell friends about these books. And let’s get herstory into the schools. The National Women’s History Project (P.O. Box 3716, Santa Rosa, CA 95402) is a great source for books and other materials for elementary through high school years. Looking through last year’s catalog, I spotted Selma, Lord, Selma about the girlhood memories of Sheyann Webb and Rachel West, and Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, a first-person narrative.

But let’s go beyond books. In our communities across the South, there are women with stories to tell. Let’s find them and listen to them and honor them. They have something to say to all of us.

Sharron Hannon is a freelance writer end former editor and publisher of Southern Feminist newspaper.