Smiles, Tears and Goose Bumps

By Jane O'Reilly

Women joyously savor a memorable moment of achievement

The Ohio delegation danced in the aisles, and the Texas delegation waved flags. Geraldine Ferraro's nomination turned tired old phrases into literal statements. For women who had pressed so long against a barrier, there was indeed an open door. For talent long wasted by exclusion, there was at last inclusion. But much of the community of emotion in Moscone Center eluded language. Pride? Joy? Incredulity? No word quite defined the feeling that was at the heart: the knowledge that the struggle had been so hard, so long, for so many.

It was 20 years for Helen Williams, a founder of 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women. It was 13 years for Jane Campbell, candidate for the Ohio legislature and former ERAmerica. She passed around champagne as the Ferraro nominating speeches ended, while across the aisle Texas women hugged and wept. It was O.K. to cry. "Did you ever think you would see the day?" Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards kept repeating. "I've worked 32 years in politics, and nothing has made me so happy," sobbed Billie Carr, Democratic National Committeewoman. Carr was 27 days old when she was taken to the 1928 Houston Democratic Convention, where the nation's first elected woman Governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming, was briefly presented as a vice-presidential nominee and gave a seconding speech for Al Smith.

"I remember the '64 convention," said Frances Humphrey Howard, who worked with Eleanor Roosevelt during the war. "Women were told to scamper. My own brother Hubert was the nominee, and I was told to get lost. Today a great partnership is occurring." Jane McMichael, legislative director for the American Federation of Government Employees, was the staff director of the National Women's Political Caucus during the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami. "Remember our so-called headquarters hotel? The cockroaches were big enough to steal the typewriters. I remember crying when Shirley Chisholm was nominated for President."

"You wonder all the time if you are crazy, if what you are doing is worthwhile," said Joanne Symons, director of political education of the American Nurses Association and a former New Hampshire Democratic state chair. "Tonight I wrote to my 19-year-old son from inside the Ferraro trailer, and I told him I felt that my life had been validated."

In a way, Ferraro is the phoenix who was snatched from the ashes of the 1982 defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. Leaders of women's groups and women elected officials began meeting that summer to plan strategies to beat Ronald Reagan. Says Eleanor Smeal, former president of the National Organization for Women: "Once we had proved the existence of the gender gap, we had to figure out how to use it."

In the spring of 1983 the Women's Presidential Project, coordinated by former Congresswoman Bella Abzug, sent questionnaires to all the announced presidential candidates. A follow-up series of meetings were held to "teach them how to reach women," says Mildred Jeffrey, a longtime official of the United Auto Workers Union. In July 1983, five of the six presidential candidates traveled to San Antonio to meet the National Women's Political Caucus. It seems amazing now to remember that this was the first time that presidential candidates had made such a pilgrimage, that until then women had been considered a political sideshow.

In October 1983, at the annual NOW meeting in Washington, the candidates again faced a women's group and were asked if they would consider having a woman in the No. 2 spot on the ticket. Across town that same week, grass-roots Democratic women passed a resolution calling for a woman nominee. Jeffrey remembers: "There was a commitment from an enormous group of feminists that if we ever believed a woman would hurt the ticket, then all bets were off."

After that the idea started to bubble and rise across the country. Women leaders tracking the polls began to believe, according to NOW President Judy Goldsmith, that "a woman appeared to mean the margin of victory."

By mid-June 1984, the idea was gaining serious momentum. At least four Governors and a majority of state Democratic leaders endorsed the idea of a woman Vice President, and so did House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who added a name: Ferraro. Congresswomen Barbara Kennelly of Connecticut, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and Mary Rose Oakar of Ohio also came out for Ferraro. Finally, on July 4, a delegation of 3 women leaders traveled to Mondale's Minnesota headquarters to make their case. The National Women's Political Caucus sent him a final compendium of arguments for a woman, and then, two days before his decision, forwarded a poll of delegates in which 75% said a woman would boost the party's chance of victory.

Last Thursday, Frances ("Sissy") Farenthold, the former Texas state representative who won 404 votes as a vice-presidential convention nominee in 1972, stood on the convention floor in San Francisco looking up at Ferraro and suddenly remembered something she had repressed for twelve years: "They didn't want me to be nominated, and after my name was placed in nomination, Pierre Salinger came and took out our floor telephone." Mondale's choice of a woman, she said, "felt like a big wave that swept away all the disappointments and defeats of the last twelve years."

"The face of American politics changed tonight," said Sylvia Watson of Louisville. Yes, but the significance of the change was that it was not an isolated stroke. The choice of Ferraro simply made it impossible to go on ignoring the changes that women like Watson had already achieved. A wife, a mother of two daughters, a second-term county commissioner, she said, "When I was elected in 1978, I was the first woman in the area to serve on a county commission. I got 95,000 votes after beginning a race with 2% name recognition. The men I worked with could not bear to have eye contact with me. It was a lot for them to deal with." She smiled and looked down at her arms, at the goose bumps that will be every woman's memory of this year's Democratic National Convention, and said, "I am not the same woman I was ten years ago. I don't cry often, but now I can't keep the tears back. It seems theological, this event; it is the way the world was meant to look, and it has taken so long."

--By Jane O'Reilly