Schenken Suzanne O’Dea. From Suffrage to the Senate: An Encyclopedia of American Women in Politics (2 Volumes)

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

3. A national amendment is the most dignified way to establish equality of

rights for men and women throughout the country.

The principle of Equal Rights for men and women is so important that it

should be written into the National Constitution as one of the basic principles

upon which our government is founded. The matter is too important to our Na-

tion’s welfare and honor to leave it to the States for favorable or unfavorable ac-

tion, or for complete neglect, as they may see fit.

At this moment when the United States is engaged in a war with the avowed

purpose of establishing freedom and equality for the whole world, the United States

should hasten to set its house in order by granting freedom and equality to its own

women. For the sake of a new and better world, as well as in justice to women them-

selves, we ask the immediate adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment.

From Congressional Digest (April 1943). Reprinted by permission.

Equal Rights for Women, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, 1969

Mr. Speaker, when a young woman graduates from college and starts looking for

a job, she is likely to have a frustrating and even demeaning experience ahead of

her. If she walks into an office for an interview, the first question she will be asked

is, “Do you type?”

There is a calculated system of prejudice that lies unspoken behind that

question. Why is it acceptable for women to be secretaries, librarians, and teach-

ers, but totally unacceptable for them to be managers, administrators, doctors,

lawyers, and Members of Congress?

The unspoken assumption is that women are different. They do not have ex-

ecutive ability, orderly minds, stability, leadership skills, and they are too emotional.

It has been observed before, that society for a long time discriminated

against another minority, the blacks, on the same basis—that they were different

and inferior. The happy little homemaker and the contented “old darkey” on the

plantation were both produced by prejudice.

As a black person, I am no stranger to race prejudice. But the truth is that

in the political world I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am

a woman than because I am black.

Prejudice against blacks is becoming unacceptable although it will take

years to eliminate it. But it is doomed because, slowly, white America is beginning

to admit that it exists. Prejudice against women is still acceptable. There is very

little understanding yet of the immorality involved in double pay scales and the

classification of most of the better jobs as “for men only.”

More than half of the population of the United States is female. But women

occupy only 2 percent of the managerial positions. They have not even reached

the level of tokenism yet. No women sit on the AFL-CIO council or Supreme

Court. There have been only two women who have held Cabinet rank, and at pres-

ent there are none. Only two women now hold ambassadorial rank in the diplo-

matic corps. In Congress, we are down to one senator and ten representatives.

Considering that there are about 3 1/2 million more women in the United

States than men, this situation is outrageous.

It is true that part of the problem has been that women have not been ag-

gressive in demanding their rights. This was also true of the black population for

many years. They submitted to oppression and even cooperated with it. Women

Documents 749

have done the same thing. But now there is an awareness of this situation partic-

ularly among the younger segment of the population.

As in the field of equal rights for blacks, Spanish-Americans, the Indians,

and other groups, laws will not change such deep-seated problems overnight. But

they can be used to provide protection for those who are most abused, and to be-

gin the process of evolutionary change by compelling the insensitive majority to

reexamine its unconscious attitudes.

It is for this reason that I wish to introduce today a proposal that has been

before every Congress for the last 40 years and that sooner or later must become

part of the basic law of the land—the equal rights amendment.

Let me note and try to refute two of the commonest arguments that are of-

fered against this amendment. One is that women are already protected under the

law and do not need legislation. Existing laws are not adequate to secure equal

rights for women. Sufficient proof of this is the concentration of women in lower

paying, menial, unrewarding jobs and their incredible scarcity in the upper level

jobs. If women are already equal, why is it such an event whenever one happens

to be elected to Congress?

It is obvious that discrimination exists. Women do not have the opportuni-

ties that men do.And women that do not conform to the system, who try to break

with the accepted patterns, are stigmatized as “odd” and “unfeminine.” The fact is

that a woman who aspires to be chairman of the board, or a member of the

House, does so for exactly the same reasons as any man. Basically, these are that

she thinks she can do the job and she wants to try.

A second argument often heard against the equal rights amendment is that

it would eliminate legislation that many states and the federal government have

enacted giving special protection to women and that it would throw the marriage

and divorce laws into chaos.

As for the marriage laws, they are due for a sweeping reform, and an excel-

lent beginning would be to wipe the existing ones off the books. Regarding spe-

cial protection for working women, I cannot understand why it should be

needed. Women need no protection that men do not need. What we need are laws

to protect working people, to guarantee them fair pay, safe working conditions,

protection against sickness and layoffs, and provision for dignified, comfortable

retirement. Men and women need these things equally. That one sex needs pro-

tection more than the other is a male supremacist myth as ridiculous and un-

worthy of respect as the white supremacist myths that society is trying to cure it-

self of at this time.

Let’s Have ERA as a Signal, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1977

Last year we celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of In-

dependence, but for most American women it’s more important to look at four

questions that relate to the present decade of the 1970s. First, how have jurists

treated official line drawing by gender before the present decade? Second, how

has the judicial response altered in the current decade? Third, what is the purpose

and function of the equal rights amendment to the federal Constitution? And fi-

nally, how may the presence (or absence) of the equal rights amendment affect

Supreme Court precedent?

750 Documents

The State of the Art to 1971

“Anything goes” seems to be a fair summary of the Supreme Court’s decisions un-

til 1971. The Court consistently had affirmed governmental authority to classify

by gender, as a trilogy of cases illustrates—Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908);

Goesaert v. Cleary, 335 U.S. 464 (1948); and Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U.S. 57 (1961).

In 1905, in the now long-discredited Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, the

Court rebuffed a state’s attempt to enact protective labor legislation for all work-

ers, men and women alike. But in 1908 in Muller the Court upheld a ten-hour day

for women only. The decision reflects themes first sounded in nineteenth century

decisions—first, that women’s place in a world controlled by men is divinely or-

dained (a thought Justice Bradley expressed in his concurring opinion in Brad-

well v. Illinois, 16 Wall. 130 [1873]); and second, that while men can fend for

themselves, women must “rest upon and look to [men] for protection.” Some-

what inconsistently, the Court added in Muller that women require the aid of the

law “to protect her from the greed as well as the passion of man.”

Next in the trilogy, Goesaert illustrates the danger lurking behind “protec-

tive” labels. This decision upheld a Michigan statute that allowed women to work

as waitresses in taverns but barred them from the more lucrative job of bartender.

The law protects women, said the state, while male bartenders plus their union

joined in a chivalrous chorus.

One of the plaintiffs was a female bar owner whose daughter, a coplaintiff,

assisted in operating the business. The state had protected away mother’s and

daughter’s right to compete with male bar owners. If the Goesaerts would not pay

a man to do a job the two women were fully capable of doing themselves, they

would have to close up shop. The Supreme Court opinion in Goesaert declares

and proceeds from this premise: “Michigan could, beyond question, forbid all

women from working behind a bar.”

Increasingly, as this century has worn on, women who needed jobs to sup-

port themselves and in many cases their families became skeptical of this kind of

“protection” from the law. From their vantage point, restrictive labor laws oper-

ate less to protect women than to protect men’s jobs from women’s competition.

In the last in the series, Hoyt, a unanimous Supreme Court held it permissi-

ble to limit women’s jury service to those who volunteered. This system yielded the

result that lay participation in the administration of justice was virtually all male.

By the late 1960s a revived and burgeoning feminist movement spotlighted

the altered life patterns of women. Two factors contributed in particular to this

changed atmosphere—the virtual disappearance of food and goods cultivated or

produced at home and the access to more effective means of birth control. The

Equal Pay Act of 1963 (29 U.S.C. § 206(d)) and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act

of 1964 (42 U.S.C. § 2000 (e) et seq.) began to focus national attention on the ad-

versely discriminatory treatment that women encountered in the labor market.

The Judicial Response after 1971

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1974

summarized the post-1971 developments this way: Supreme Court precedent

with respect to gender-based discrimination is “still evolving,”“rapidly changing,

and variously interpreted” (509 F. 2d 508, 510). In the same year in an article in

Documents 751

the New York University Law Review Prof. John Johnston, Jr., commented that the

courts are “not certain what constitutes sex discrimination, how virulent this

form of discrimination is or how it should be analyzed in terms of due process

and equal protection.” My own appraisal, expressed in an article in The Supreme

Court Review, 1975, is that the Supreme Court had taken a few remarkable steps

in a new direction, but it had shied away from doctrinal development and had left

open avenues of retreat.

The first break from the “anything goes” pattern was Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S.

71, in which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional an Idaho law provid-

ing that as between persons “equally entitled” to administer a decedent’s estate,

“males must be preferred to females.” A year and a half later, in Frontiero v.

Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973), married women in the uniformed services were

held entitled to the same fringe benefits as married men. Under the law that the

Supreme Court declared unconstitutional, married men automatically received a

housing allowance and medical care for their wives, while married women re-

ceived these benefits only if they supplied all their own support and more than

half of their husband’s.

In 1974 the Supreme Court retrenched, first in Kahn v. Shevin, 416 U.S. 351,

a decision upholding exclusion of widowers from the Florida statute that grants

widows a real property tax exemption. This exemption saved the real-property-

owning widow the grand sum of fifteen dollars annually. A benign favor for (wid-

owed) women? The Supreme Court said the fifteen dollar saving compensated

women for past economic disadvantage. Florida gave three classes this little tax

break: the blind, the totally and permanently disabled, and widows.

Later in 1974 the Court returned a decision impossible to rationalize as a fa-

vor to women. In Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484, the Court upheld a California

statute that excluded women disabled by pregnancy from a workers’ income pro-

tection disability insurance plan. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has held

that school teachers may not be dismissed or placed on involuntary leave arbi-

trarily at a fixed stage in pregnancy (414 U.S. 632 [1974]) and that pregnant

women ready and willing to work may not be denied unemployment compensa-

tion (423 U.S. 44 [1975]).

Absence of a consistent, comprehensible approach to this issue was further

indicated last month. In General Electric Company v. Gilbert, 45 U.S.L.W. 4031

(December 7, 1976), the Court confronted an employer’s plan providing nonoc-

cupational sickness and accident benefits to all employees, save only those with

disabilities arising from pregnancy. Construing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of

1964, the Court declared this exclusion entailed no gender-based discrimination

at all!

With no pregnant problems on its calendar, 1975 brought the Supreme

Court back to the 1971–73 track. In Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, the Court

overturned its 1961 Hoyt women’s jury service decision and declared unconstitu-

tional a Louisiana provision that restricted jury service by women to volunteers. In

Stanton v. Stanton, 421 U.S. 7, the Court declared unconstitutional a Utah law that

required parents to support a son until he is twenty-one but a daughter only until

she is eighteen. And in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U.S. 636, the Court struck

down one of a series of Social Security sex lines. It held a widowed father to be en-

titled to the same benefits to care for his child that a widowed mother receives.

752 Documents

Is Wiesenfeld a men’s rights case? Only derivatively. The discrimination

started with Paula Wiesenfeld, a wage-earning woman. When she died, her social

insurance provided less protection for her family than the social insurance of a

wage-earning man. Paula Wiesenfeld paid social security taxes without any dis-

count. But the payout to her survivors, husband Stephen and son Jason Paul, was

subject to a drastic discount.

Do We Need the E.R.A.?

The key to the Supreme Court’s performance in the 1970s is not so much the spe-

cific results of decided cases but how those results were reached. The justices so

far have avoided articulating general principles and have shown a tendency to

deal with each case as an isolated instance in a narrow frame. No opinion at-

tracting five votes acknowledges a clear perception of what computer runs or fed-

eral and state statutes so plainly reveal—that the particular statutes presented to

the Supreme Court are part of a pervasive design, a design reflecting distinctly

nonneutral notions about “the way women (or men) are.”

Why does the Court shy away from doctrinal development? For an alto-

gether understandable reason. Justice Powell explained the problem in his Fron-

tiero concurring opinion. The Court must act with particular circumspection, he

said, in the dim zone between constitutional interpretation (a proper judicial

task) and constitutional amendment (a job for federal and state legislatures).

But the equal protection guarantee exists for all persons, and the Supreme

Court has indeed acknowledged that women are “persons” within the meaning of

the Fourteenth Amendment. Why, then, the reluctance to interpret the equal pro-

tection principle dynamically in this area? Because it is historic fact that neither

the founding fathers nor the Reconstruction Congress had women’s emancipa-

tion on the agenda. When the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments

were added to the Constitution, women were denied the vote, the most basic right

of adult citizens. If they were married, in many states they could not contract,

hold property, or litigate on their own behalf. Courts are sensitive to that history.

Race discrimination decisions may be anchored with some security to the

design of those who drafted the Constitution. Indeed, in the 1872 Slaughter-

House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, the Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal

protection clause is so clearly a provision for the black race that the Court

doubted whether any other form of official discrimination would ever be held to

come within its purview.

Recognition of women as “persons” occurred in the Supreme Court’s 1874

Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, opinion, a decision rejecting a woman’s claim

to the franchise. Beyond doubt women are “persons” and may be “citizens”within

the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court said. So are children, it

went on to explain, and no one would suggest children have a constitutional right

to the franchise.

The adoption of the equal rights amendment would relieve the Court’s un-

easiness in the gray zone between interpretation and amendment of the Consti-

tution. It would remove the historical impediment—the absence of any intention

by eighteenth and nineteenth century Constitution makers to deal with gender-

based discrimination. It would add to our fundamental instrument of govern-

ment a principle under which the judiciary may develop the coherent opinion

Documents 753

pattern lacking up to now. It also should end the legislative inertia that retards so-

cial change by keeping obsolete discriminatory laws on the books. And, as Justice

Stevens observed in his confirmation hearings, the amendment would have sym-

bolic importance. It would serve as a forthright statement of our moral and legal

commitment to a system in which neither sons nor daughters are pigeonholed by

government because of their sex. Rather, so far as laws and officialdom are con-

cerned, males and females will be free to grow, develop, and aspire in accordance

with their individual talents, preferences, and capacities.

What Are the Consequences?

What are the consequences of the High Court’s unwillingness to articulate a prin-

ciple of general application governing legislative line drawing by gender?

A look at the Court’s docket for this current term indicates the situation.

First, Oklahoma’s 3.2 beer law is before the Court (No. 75–628). This is a “pro-

tective” statute with an unusual twist in that it permits girls to buy 3.2 beer or

work in a beer parlor at the age of eighteen, while boys must wait until they are

twenty-one. The plaintiff, Carolyn Whitener, is an entrepreneur who sells 3.2

beer, and her coplaintiff is an apparently thirsty young man. It is an embarrass-

ment that a law of this kind is retained by a legislature and must occupy the at-

tention of the highest court in the nation.

Second, there is another Social Security Act challenge (No. 75–699). W, a

wage earner, dies. H, her spouse, is not himself covered under social security. H

seeks survivors’ benefits under W’s account. The law says H is not entitled unless

W outearned H three to one. For a spouse to qualify under a female wage earner’s

account, the female must provide all her own support, plus half of his—in other

words, three fourths of the total family support.

If the situation were the other way around—if a male were the covered

worker, a female the survivor—the survivor would qualify for benefits without

regard to H’s and W’s respective contributions to family income. Women are put

on a par with men for social security contribution purposes, but the payout un-

der a woman’s account is less than the payout under a man’s.

That very same gender differential was declared unconstitutional in Fron-

tiero v. Richardson, the 1973 military fringe benefits case. And Weinberger v.

Wiesenfield, the 1975 social security case, overturned a differential that the solic-

itor general described as “closely analogous.” Yet despite a unanimous decision in

Wiesenfeld and a near unanimous (eight-to-one) judgment in Frontiero, the

Court did not deem it appropriate to affirm summarily. And the solicitor general

argues, with some justification, that each precedent in the 1970s was written for

one case and one day alone.

With the ERA on the books, we may expect Congress and state legislatures

to undertake in earnest, systematically and pervasively, the law revision so long

deferred. History should teach that the entire job is not likely to be done until the

ERA supplies the signal. In the event of legislative default, the courts will be

guided by a constitutional text clearly and cleanly in point.

Without the ERA, the judiciary will continue to be plagued with a succes-

sion of cases challenging laws and official practices that belong on history’s scrap

heap. The Supreme Court will confront again and again the need for principled

754 Documents

decisions to guide the lower courts and the difficulty of anchoring those decisions

to the text of eighteenth and nineteenth century draftsmen.

The American Bar Association endorsed the equal rights amendment in Au-

gust of 1974. The resolution aroused scant opposition. No one spoke against it in

the House of Delegates; only a dozen or so “nay” votes were audible. The resolu-

tion included a commitment to work for ratification by the number of states re-

quired to write the amendment into the Constitution.

That commitment is hardly fulfilled. It is my hope that the Association, as a

reasoned voice for the profession, will move swiftly this year to carry out its 1974

undertaking and its pledge to play an active role in educating the public. For the

American Bar Association, perhaps more than any other professional organiza-

tion, has the capacity and resources to dispel misunderstanding on this issue and

to explain why the ERA is the way for a society that believes in the essential hu-

man dignity and interdependence of each man and each woman.

Reprinted from the American Bar Association Journal, 63 (January 1977),

70–73, with permission from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Eyewitness: Beating the Bra Burners, Phyllis Schlafly, 1997

A giant rainbow of balloons hovered high over the dais in the Omni Shoreham

ballroom in Washington, D.C. Some 1,400 battle-weary but triumphant Stop

ERA volunteers gathered to savor their victory when the proposed equal rights

amendment died at midnight on June 30, 1982.

Amid the clamor, a hotel security guard rushed toward the emcee, Represen-

tative Bob Dornan of California, with urgent news: The hotel had received a phone

call that a bomb had been planted in the ballroom. But the Stop ERA revelers just

had to laugh. No need to evacuate. We anticipated that a bomb threat would be the

radical feminists’ last insult, and police dogs had already sniffed out the room.

It was the last day of a ten-year David-and-Goliath struggle waged across

America. A little band of women, headquartered in the kitchen of my home on the

bluffs of the Mississippi in Alton, Illinois, had defeated the big guns. The odds

against us could not have been greater. The ERA drew the support of presidents

(Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter), would-be presidents of all polit-

ical stripes (from Ted Kennedy to George Wallace), all members of Congress except

eight in the Senate and 24 in the House, all the pushy women’s organizations, a con-

sortium of 35 women’s magazines, and what seemed like 99 percent of the media.

In March 1972, Congress sent ERA to the states for their legislatures to ap-

prove, and its ratification by the necessary three-fourths of the 50 states seemed

inevitable. But the unstoppable was stopped by our unflappable ladies in red.

They descended on state capitols wearing their octagonal STOP ERA buttons.

They treated legislators to home-baked bread. And they sweetly and persistently

made their case that ERA was a fraud: It would actually take away legal rights that

women possessed, such as the right of an 18-year-old girl to be exempt from the

military draft and the right of a wife to be supported by her husband.

Pro-ERA advocates argued that women wanted absolute equality anyway.

That line didn’t sell in Middle America. A noisy tax-funded national women’s

confab in November 1977 had showcased ERA’s hidden agenda: abortion funding

and same-sex unions. The noose around ERA was tightening.

Documents 755

The war over these ideas included annual clashes in key states. But the deci-

sive battle (i.e., what Midway was to World War II) took place in Springfield, Illi-

nois, on June 18, 1980. If we could win in this northern industrial state, then we

could triumph in pro-ERA territory, and other states might swing our way. Pres-

ident Carter rang up Democratic legislators, in my view luring votes for ERA with

talk of new federal housing projects for their districts. Back in 1978, Governor

James Thompson phoned Republican legislators, reportedly promising “jobs,

roads, and bridges” for a yes vote. Later, Chicago pols rallied their lawmakers to

ERA’s side, allegedly under threat of seeing their relatives and friends lose city

patronage jobs. Some ERA supporters even offered cash bribes for votes. But in

1980, ERA failed once again.

After the votes were tallied, ABC’s Nightline caught Eleanor Smeal, president

of the National Organization for Women, in the Illinois House gallery. “There is

something very powerful out against us,” she said. “And certainly it isn’t people.”

The Stop ERAers knew the source of their power: prayer and the truth.

ERA activists persisted in desperate tactics at that crucial statehouse. In May

and June of 1982, an excommunicated Mormon, Sonia Johnson, led a hunger

strike in the rotunda, while upstairs other pro-ERAers chained themselves to the

door of the Senate chamber. On June 25, ERA supporters went to a slaughter-

house, purchased plastic bags of pigs’ blood, and used it to spell out the names of

the legislators they hated most on the capitol’s marble floor. The lawmakers

found these tactics, well, unpersuasive. Victory was sealed on June 30, 1982, and

many politicians paid tribute. But the day’s heroes were the women who came

from the 15 states that never ratified ERA and from the 5 states that bravely re-

scinded their previous ratifications.

That evening, singers Bill and Prudence Fields sang the appropriate themes:

“The Impossible Dream” and “Great Day.”

From George Magazine, June, 1997. Reprinted with permission.

756 Documents

Women, Campaigns, and Political Parties

Women have sought political power by working in their parties and by running for

office since the 1870s, long before women had voting rights. The first woman to ac-

tively seek the presidency was Victoria Woodhull, a newspaper publisher and owner

of a stock brokerage firm, who announced her candidacy in the New York Herald in

1870. Other women followed Woodhull, but it would be more than ninety years be-

fore a woman sought a major party’s nomination. The first was Senator Margaret

Chase Smith, who sought the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1964.

Eight years later, Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) became a candidate for the Demo-

cratic Party’s presidential nomination. She examined the meaning of her candidacy

in a speech before the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1973. Republican Eliz-

abeth Dole, former Secretary of Labor and former Secretary of Transportation,

sought to be her party’s nominee in the year 2000 elections.

The televised and widely reported Republican and Democratic national con-

ventions, held to select each party’s presidential nominees, provide the parties with a

national stage that they use to attract supporters. Party leaders carefully choose

keynote speakers and party activists seek to be one of the keynoters. At the 1976

Democratic national convention, Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) was the first African

American woman to keynote a national party convention, captivating the audience

with her powerful message.

By the late 1990s, Republican party leaders had become aware of the gender

gap that existed between the two major parties. Women tended to favor the Demo-

cratic Party and its candidates over the Republican Party and its candidates, a factor

that helped elect President Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. During the 1996 elections,

Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-WA) sought to convince women that the Republican Party

was addressing their concerns when she addressed groups on behalf of male Repub-

lican congressional candidates.

I Announce Myself as a Candidate for the Presidency, Victoria Woodhull, 1870

As I happen to be the most prominent representative of the only unrepresented

class in the republic, and perhaps the most practical exponent of the principles of

equality, I request the favor of being permitted to address the public through the

Herald. While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws

that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence;

while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others ar-

gued the equality of woman with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in

business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why women

should be treated, socially and politically, as being inferior to man, I boldly en-

tered the arena of politics and business and exercised the rights I already pos-

sessed. I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised women of the

country, and believing as I do that the prejudices which still exist in the popular

mind against women in public life will soon disappear, I now announce myself as

a candidate for the Presidency.

. . . The present position of political parties is anomalous. They are not in-

spired by any great principles of policy or economy; there is no live issue up for

discussion. A great national question is wanted....That question exists in the is-

sue, whether woman shall . . . be elevated to all the political rights enjoyed by

Documents 757

man. The simple issue whether woman should not have this complete political

equality . . . is the only one to be tried, and none more important is likely to arise

before the Presidential election.

Printed in the New York Herald, April 2, 1870.

Women in Politics, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, 1973

When it was arranged that I should speak to you today, Liz Carpenter wrote me

a note and suggested my speech should be, “Can a Woman Become President?”

Knowing Liz, she probably thought this would be a wonderful occasion for me to

exhort an audience of potential candidates to plan their own onslaughts on the

pinnacle of elective office.

As I look back on the past year and a half, I think my campaign did help to

break the barrier against women seeking the presidency and other elective offices,

but my experiences also made me acutely aware of some of the problems women

candidates face as well as particular problems which the women’s movement, and

especially the National Women’s Political Caucus, must face up to.

One of my biggest problems was that my campaign was viewed as a sym-

bolic gesture. While I realized that my campaign was an important rallying sym-

bol for women and that my presence in the race forced the other candidates to

deal with issues relating to women, my primary objective was to force people to

accept me as a real viable candidate.

Although many have compared my race to that of Victoria Woodhull, I

specifically rejected that comparison. Mrs. Woodhull was a feminist candidate

running on a feminist party platform. I specifically rejected this feminist candi-

dacy as I did the projection of myself into a black candidacy or an antiwar candi-

dacy. I chose to run for the nomination of one of the major national parties.

I did this because I feel that the time for tokenism and symbolic gestures is

past. Women need to plunge into the world of politics and battle it out toe to toe

on the same ground as their male counterparts. If they do not do this, they will

not succeed as a presidential candidate or in any other campaign for political of-

fice.

First and foremost, it is essential that you believe in yourself and your abil-

ity to handle the job you are seeking. If you don’t, it is difficult to persuade oth-

ers to support you. While pretty obvious to anyone who has run for office, I found

that the press, the public, and even those in the women’s movement found it dif-

ficult to understand this key point. Over and over in the campaign, I was asked,

“But why are you running, Mrs. Chisholm?” Over and over I would reply, “Be-

cause I think I can do the job,” “Because I think I am better than the rest of the

candidates in the field.”

One of the stumbling blocks I encountered was the fact that many people,

including feminists, thought that since I “didn’t have a chance” it was foolish to

work for me.

For those who genuinely preferred another candidate, one can have no

quarrel. But for those who thought I was the best candidate but chose to work for

someone else because they viewed my campaign as hopeless, they will need to re-

examine their thinking for truly, no woman will ever achieve the presidency as

long as their potential supporters hold this view.

As the effect of the Wallace phenomenon in this last election points out, a

758 Documents