Evolution of Women in Politics

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Women Advance in Politics By Evolution, Not Revolution
By CATHERINE S. MANEGOLD
Published: October 21, 1992
In this acidic political season in which Anita Hill has become a shorthand for outrage and the "Year of the Woman" is a familiar refrain, it is easy to believe that revolution is at hand.
But come November, when the voting is over, there will be no storming of the gates.
Even a wave of victories by female candidates will not give women dominance on Capitol Hill. Should a female candidate win in every possible race, the 103d Congress would still be 80 percent male.
More likely, many women will lose, leaving the United States still well behind most European countries in female representation. Yet women have made steady gains in politics since the early 1970's, and this year they will make more. Already, half again as many women (108) have won Congressional primaries as ever before. (The previous record was 70 in 1990.)
Eleven women, a record by one, are running for the Senate. State legislatures will be changing, too. In California, women will run in 74 of 120 races. Every victory will bring another woman experience that may some day propel her toward a higher office. Patience, Patience

Those gains have been the stuff of sweat, not spontaneous combustion. Though women have clearly been beneficiaries of voters' enthusiasm for change, actual victories at the ballot box will be not so much a result of sputtering anger as of the long, little-noticed efforts of a band of well-spoken political guerrillas.
Undaunted by early defeats, scrounging money from mailings stamped "Urgent!," this loosely knit community has worked for well over a decade to recruit and elect female candidates. Its members have guided campaigns and gathered in hotel rooms to study everything from hairdos to handshakes and help women in a competitive world they tend to enter later and with less professional experience than men.
As long ago as the early 1970's, groups like the National Women's Political Caucus gathered candidates for seminars in the building blocks of fund-raising, stump speaking and other campaign fundamentals. Then, that group and others gave that most essential of campaign lubricants: money.
The groups' common goal is as difficult as it sounds simple: never to quit until women, who make up almost 52 percent of the population, have something like 52 percent of the clout.
"We've got the objective reality that women vote differently than men on important issues," said Patricia Ireland, the peripatetic president of the National Organization for Women. "It is women who experience sexual harassment on the job. It is women who experience violence in the home. It is women who are still the primary care givers. If we are going to have a representative government, we have to have women in office."
Studies of voting patterns conducted by the Rutgers Center for the American Woman in Politics show that women vote differently from men on many issues.
Ultimately, the advocates believe, having more women in office can make the difference between a bill's passage and its defeat. According to a NOW study on female legislators and social policy, 71 percent of women -- but only 52 percent of the men -- in Congress voted unsuccessfully to override a Presidential veto of the Family Medical Leave Act.
More recently, when Congress sought to override President Bush's veto of a bill that would have allowed federally financed family-planning clinics to provide information on abortion, women voted overwhelmingly to override but failed to carry the day. 'Tribes on the Hill'
"It's not like we are taking over the country," said Harriett Woods, the president of the National Women's Political Caucus and a two-time losing senatorial candidate from Missouri. "But men left to themselves are like tribes on the Hill. We just want to try things our way."
The groups operate on a first-name basis in a loose yet complementary community. Still, disputes simmer. Some women believe that political contributions should be invested only in candidates with a good chance of winning. Others say that victory is impossible to predict, so the more the merrier. Some believe women should not run against each other and cite the bitter New York Senate primary in which Geraldine A. Ferraro and Elizabeth Holtzman were defeated. Others say that men do, so why shouldn't they?
This year, such questions have eased a bit. Despite the recession, the groups' bank accounts are brimming as never before. The stumbling economy and the resulting focus on domestic concerns have pushed issues like family and medical leave, health care and abortion rights to the fore. High-profile candidates like Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein in California, Carol Moseley Braun in Illinois and Lynn H. Yeakel in Pennsylvania have now made the goals seem more reasonable. Democrats Benefit More
The boon, however, has gone primarily to the Democrats. The Republican Party, split over a conservative platform that would outlaw abortion and perceived this year as almost hostile to women's rights, has alienated some Republican women and missed out on some of the energies generated by the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy. President Bush may have compounded that problem Thursday during the debate in Richmond when, noting that most female candidates are Democrats, he said, "I hope a lot of them lose."
This year, 10 of the 11 women running for the Senate are Democrats who represent the mostly liberal ideals shared by the women's political groups. Democrats dominate races for the House of Representatives as well, 71 to 37.
There was no real beginning. Instead, the effort to move women center stage has been propelled by a series of losses, setbacks and moments of recognition so complex and varied that no one date suffices.
In 1973, when the Women's Political Caucus, a group devoted to furthering women's participation in government, held its first national convention in a hotel in Texas, the front desk refused to page one of the participants on the ground that only a prostitute would answer a hotel summons.
Year by year, more women were willing to face such invective and challenge the odds against them. Year by year, most of them lost. New Surge of Energy
Then 1982, the year that saw the equal rights amendment drift past its deadline and into virtual defeat, brought a new surge of energy. Activists with the women's movement suddenly turned their sights toward mainstream politics. While Ms. Woods's commitment was triggered by lessons learned through her own defeat, other figures such as Eleanor C. Smeal, then the president of the National Organization for Women, decided to move away from street protests to pull more traditional levers of power.
The E.R.A.'s demise and the election year itself had sent two powerful messages:
First, studies done after the E.R.A. deadline passed showed that female legislators had voted in favor of it more often than men, with a gap of up to 40 percentage points in some states.
Second, 1982, like 1992, was a post-census election year that had more open seats than usual because of redistricting. A study of the winners showed that women (like all challengers) made better gains in reconstructed or open districts than they did fighting against incumbents. Finding and Financing
The lessons and strategic refinements of the following years held the seeds of a conflict that still simmers.
Early political groups like the National Women's Political Caucus and the Women's Campaign Fund built their work around the notion that it was up to them to find and finance the best candidates they could. Working with limited resources and plenty of heart, they stormed the country looking for women who would run. Then, fearing that a woman's loss was actually a double loss -- once for the candidate herself, and again for those women who might follow -- they tried to determine who would win.
In 1985, Ellen R. Malcolm, a straight-speaking, independently wealthy Washingtonian who had watched Ms. Woods's second defeat with dismay, founded Emily's List to raise money and finance women's candidacies. Taking its name from the phrase "early money is like yeast," and contributions from a loose network of women sympathetic to the cause (10 percent of the group's members are men), Ms. Malcolm devised a novel fund-raising strategy. Convinced that every dollar must be fired like a rifle, Ms. Malcolm requires candidates to provide polling data and proof of a well-organized campaign.
The stakes are huge. Those candidates who win the group's backing gain a certain celebrity status along with bundles of checks. The fund-raising strategy this year is expected to raise $6 million in contributions, making that group by far the best financed.
"If we took money and gave it to 150 women equally instead of the 35 we thought could win," said Ms. Malcolm, "then some of those 35 wouldn't win."
But some feminists say this rifle-shot approach penalizes deserving candidates. "You can't predict winners," said Ms. Smeal, the former NOW president. "Politics isn't like that."
In 1987, she founded the Fund for the Feminist Majority, and began a nationwide drive called "the feminization of power" to encourage women to aspire to positions of power in everything from student councils to the White House. Though the fund does not contribute to candidates because of its tax status, this year it dispatched a team of fierce lieutenants through California, New York, Arizona, Oregon, Tennessee and South Carolina to identify potential candidates.
Using a slick campaign, huge mailings and a sizable staff, it spreads the message that a major surge in representation can be obtained only by "flooding" tickets with women on the ground that some will win, some will lose and everyone will learn something in the process.
In Georgia, Cynthia McKinney, a charismatic Democrat from a predominantly black district, said her campaign team had estimated that it would have cost about $50,000 to provide the data, information and structure that Ms. Malcolm's group required.
"We only had about $20,000 in the bank," Ms. McKinney said. Instead, Ms. McKinney's campaign received help from the National Organization for Women. "They had confidence in my candidacy when other groups didn't," she said. "NOW really came through for us." An endorsement soon followed from the Women's Campaign Fund, and now, having won the primary for an open seat, she is given a good chance at victory.
Groups teach everything from how to organize a campaign budget to how to make a stump speech.
At Emily's List, once a candidate is endorsed, she is coached. "Women candidates are very serious," said Ms. Malcolm. "They learn and learn. It's like they are trying to pass their S.A.T.'s."
Someday, perhaps, such remedial training will no longer be needed. Someday, too, in the far distant future when women fill the halls of Congress and the Senate has finally built a women's bathroom (female senators now use the wives' lounge) someone, sometime may sputter and declare that it is high time, really, for a "Year of the Man."
But that will be another generation's battle.
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