Running as a Woman

Gender and Power in American Politics

Linda Witt, Glenna Matthews, Karen M. Paget

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780028740690
• eBook ISBN: 9781439106105
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Women have become a strong force in electoral politics, as candidates, office holders, and vocal constituents. In Running as a Woman, Linda Witt, Karen Paget, and Glenna Matthews explore the significant issues for women in public life: their marital status, the threat of sexual innuendo, what's involved in becoming a credible candidate, and raising enough money to run. They also explain how voters are mobilized to vote for women, how the media cover them, how they get their campaign message out, what it's like to lose, and what difference women make once elected. In addition, Running as a Woman includes a compelling history of women in politics that both records the political role women have played throughout the last two centuries and explains how and why women have continually been stifled in their attempts to enter political life.While the 1992 elections were hailed as a giant leap forward for women, the 1994 elections created a skepticism that real, permanent changes occurred. In Running as a Woman, the authors set the record straight with a chapter that analyzes the results of the 1994 elections and their relevance for women today.

NOTES

Chapter 1. Breaking Ground

1. The figure of 213 was cited in the Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1992, reportedly based on information from the Federal Election Commission. The precise figure for women running in primary elections is difficult to calculate. The FEC could not confirm the number of 213. Lucy Baruch, of the Eagleton Institute’s Center for the American Woman and Polities (CAWP), told the authors that the figure is imprecise partly because the gender of many candidates’ first names is difficult to determine from reading state ballots. Also, some women announce exploratory committees to consider running and then decide not to do so.

2. This slogan, which gained such prominence in 1992, was first used to describe the election cycle of 1974, when forty-four women won nominations for the House and three women won nominations for the Senate. (Eighteen of those women nominated for the House won their seats, while none of the three women won lier Senate race.) It had been foreshadowed during Congresswoman Bella Abzug’s reelection campaign in 1972. Life magazine did a feature story on Abzug, whose picture was on the front cover. Although Abzug’s reelection bid was in trouble, she was viewed as a symbol of a women’s movement in transition from “empty rhetoric and bra-burning fulminations” to the “tougher work of organizing to get what they want.” The story opened with the sentence, “It may not quite be the Year of the Woman.” The slogan was frequently applied to the 1990 election cycle, when women ran for governor in the important states of Texas, California, and Oregon, and in several high-profile House and Senate races. For instance, Congresswoman Lynn Martin challenged veteran incumbent Senator Paul Simon, and Congresswoman Claudine Schneider challenged longtime chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. In each instance, the “Year of the Woman” was said to have not materialized.

3. The figure for the House of Representatives varies, depending upon whether District of Columbia delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton is counted, since delegates to the House do not have full voting privileges. When she is counted, the figure of women in the House of Representatives is listed as forty-nine.

4. Speech given by Susan Yoachim to the Women’s Campaign Fund Breakfast. September 22, 1992, in which she quotes from her interview with Steinem at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

5. Charen’s syndicated column appeared in the Rocky Mountain News on October 29, 1992.

6. Author’s interview with Ellen Malcolm, October 19, 1992.

7. See, for example, Celinda Lake, “Campaigning in a Different Voice.” report prepared alter the 1988 elections, and “Challenging the Credibility Gap,” report prepared after the 1990 elections. Both reports are available from EMlLY’sList.

8. Remarks by Michael Herman at the Women’s Campaign Fund Seminar, Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, October 12, 1989, transcript p. 103.

9. Presentation by Celinda Lake at the Forum for Women State Legislators, sponsored by CAWP, San Diego, November 15, 1991.

10. Author’s interview with Sharon Rodine, former executive director of the National Women’s Political Caucus, January 19, 1991.

11. Author’s interview with Mervin Field, August 21, 1991.

12. Quoted in a Sunday magazine story by Linda Witt, “Two Women,” San Jose Mercury News, May 31, 1992.

13. Wire service copy, New York Times, August 20, 1992.

14. Feinstein and Boxer fund-raising event, Davies Symphony Hall, October 19,1992.

15. The Kaptur and Morella comments were quotations from a special feature on women in USA Today, April 1, 1992.

16. Geraldine Ferraro, speech during a breakfast meeting sponsored by the Women’s Campaign Fund, San Francisco, August 16, 1991.

17. Quoted in the “Getting It Gazette,” published by an ad hoc watchdog group that monitored women’s campaigns in 1992.

18. Wire service copy, New York Times, September 11, 1992. For examples of the historical debate over women’s nature, see Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement: 1890-1920(New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). Kraditor argues that the nineteenth-century movement made a transition from a rights-based argument, emphasizing equality and similarity, to one based on women’s capacity to give service to others, thus playing up their difference.

19. For an in-depth account of women’s changing economic roles, see Barbara R. Bergmann. The Economic Emergence of Women (New York: Basic Hooks, 1986), and Julie A. Matthaei. An Economic History of Women in America (New York: Schocken, 1982).

20. Cited in Leo Kanowitz. Women and the Law (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969). p. 35. On the concept of coverture, see also Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), and Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modem Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Kerber is currently completing a major study on women and citizenship.

21. Kanowitz, p. 59.

22. Kanowitz, p. 38.

23. Quoted in the “Getting It Gazette.”

24. Hillary Clinton described this sequence of events at a fund-raising event in San Francisco, March 25, 1992.

25. This debate continues. Two months after President Clinton named Hillary Rodham Clinton to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• Breaking Ground
• Creating a New Tradition
• Emerging from Jezebel’s Shadow
• Squaring the Personal and the Political
• Crossing the Credibility Threshold
• Raising the Ante
• Mobilizing Women’s Votes
• Decoding the Press
• Delivering the Message
• Losing
• What Difference Does Difference Make
• The Elections of 1994 A Work in Progress
• NOTES
• INDEX