Toward Female Power at the Polls

NO trouble spotting Bella Abzug, beaming belligerently from under her familiar hat. Or Gloria Steinem in her granny glasses and jeans. But who was that lady in fluttering chiffon who looked as if she might have walked in from another era? None other than Lenore Romney, wife of George Romney, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. She quickly made it clear that she was very much a part of the scene. She told the women in the audience to get hip to politics. She cracked an antisexist joke: "After God created Adam, he looked him over and said: 'I think with my second chance I can do better.' " She concluded with a rousing "Right on!"

The scene was last month's fund raiser in Washington for the National Women's Political Caucus. The caucus is a serious nationwide effort to get women involved full time in politics. Headquartered in Washington, the caucus has established branches in 46 states and has been holding well-attended regional workshops in political techniques. Its motto: "Women! Make policy not coffee." Or, to reverse a man's metaphor: if you can stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

The first order of business is to get as many women as possible elected, or selected, as delegates to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Democratic Party reform gave women an opportunity by calling for fair representation of all groups within the party. If at least half the delegate spots do not go to women, the caucus threatens to challenge the offending state delegations. Presidential candidates have been scrambling to put more women on their slates, and in some cases begging for them. Less committed to internal party reform, Republicans have not shown the same alacrity; but President Nixon, at least, is well aware of feminine voting power. His re-election campaign will include four regional women's meetings at which Pat Nixon, Mrs. Spiro T. Agnew or Mrs. Martha Mitchell will speak.

The caucus is strictly bipartisan.

Says Democrat Steinem: "I get along much better with female Republicans than I do with Larry O'Brien. I will go anywhere to work for a Republican woman running for office--or if it would help more, I would not go." While the caucus has its share of familiar liberationists like Betty Friedan, it also includes Liz Carpenter, the tart-tongued Texan who used to be Lady Bird Johnson's press secretary; Businesswoman Virginia Allan, who served as chairman of President Nixon's task force on women's rights; and former Republican National Committeewoman Elly Peterson, her party's candidate for Michigan Senator eight years ago. The members of the caucus have little in common but their sex and a determination to raise its standing in American politics.

Beyond the immediate delegate hunt, the caucus has been lobbying hard on Capitol Hill. It helped persuade Congress to pass a national program of day care, though the bill was vetoed by the President. It is fervently backing the Equal Rights amendment, which bans discrimination based on sex. The measure, which has passed the House, will probably come to a vote in the Senate this month. Senator Sam Ervin, who opposes the amendment as superfluous, recently told a meeting of the National Council of Jewish Women: "God could not be everywhere, so he made mothers." For its part, the Women's Caucus is backing a mother, Business Executive Martha McKay, who plans to run against Ervin in North Carolina in 1974. Ultimately, the caucus wants mothers--or women of any kind--running for office everywhere, though this will take time and education, as the caucus admits.

While the caucus hopes to promote a new political force of acutely aware women, American politics has a way of absorbing one-issue movements. There is too much else at stake in politics. Already, the Women's Political Caucus in Manhattan has begun to split into any number of sisterhoods under the pressure of competing interests. Caucuses have been formed within caucuses. Various ethnic groups have taken turns packing meetings to get their own people elected and others eliminated. A Dominican woman recently complained that the white liberals were siding with blacks against the browns.

Even Whim. Traditionally, too, American women have rarely engaged in politics on behalf of their own sex. Analysis of voting patterns over the years shows that there is nothing readily definable as the women's vote. American women, in fact, cast their ballot much like American men. More important than sex in determining how they will vote are education, class, ethnic background, race, religion or even whim. As Herbert Hyman, professor of sociology at Wesleyan University, puts it: "Women are as heterogeneous a mess as anybody could use for an analytical concept."

Some slight differences, however, have been detected in the behavior of the sexes in the voting booth. Women seem to prefer the safe-and-sound candidate, the one least likely to embark on war or some other hazardous undertaking. They are a bit less racially prejudiced when they vote, a bit more internationally minded. Their response to charisma is apparently overrated. Younger women may jump and squeal, older women may gush over a candidate like John Lindsay; but once they go to vote, they are less susceptible to their emotions. It was not the glamorous ex-PT boat commander, John F. Kennedy, who won the bulk of the women's vote in 1960. More than 50% of women preferred Richard Nixon. "You didn't find the anti-Nixon attitudes among women," says Warren Miller, director of the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. "Even strong Democrats didn't refer to him as 'Tricky Dick' or make jokes about the used-car salesman." In 1964, women voted more heavily than men for Lyndon

Johnson; four years later they chose Nixon over Hubert Humphrey.* Far fewer women than men voted for George Wallace. Depending on one's analysis, the women's vote tends to be more commonsensible or less adventurous.

From these straws, can the Women's Caucus build a political home for women? Its members like to think that the past is not prologue. For the first time since the women's suffrage movement, American male politicians are responding earnestly to women's demands: equal pay for equal work, simplified divorce and abortion, readily available day-care centers. By 1976, enough of a bloc might be formed to tip the balance in a presidential election. But in the long run, it may turn out that, in a sense, woman's place is in the home after all. Voting studies have indicated that anywhere from 75% to 95% of women vote like their husbands: conjugality breeds conformity. That does not mean that their husbands tell them how to vote. Hyman, for one, speculates that it may well be the other way around. As her political consciousness increases, woman may be even more assertive within the household, so long as man remains willing to surrender a share of the political judgment to her. Her greatest political influence may thus fall--as so much of her power already does--within the traditional family.

*The Institute for Social Research reached this conclusion after conducting a postelection survey of 1,488 voters. A Gallup poll, on the other hand, reported that more women voted for Humphrey.

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