Having committed their intellects and numbers to installing their man in office, the New Right women anticipated new opportunities for themselves in the post-1980 White House. Instead, with Ronald Reagan’s election, women began disappearing from federal office.
On the bench, new female judicial appointments fell from 15 percent under Carter to 8 percent. The number of female appointees requiring Senate confirmation plunged, too, making Reagan the first president in more than a decade not to better his predecessor’s record. On the White House staff, the number of women appointed dropped from 123 in 1980 to 62 in 1981. In fact, even 62 was an inflated figure; the Reagan administration padded the numbers by suddenly labeling women in lower-ranking government career jobs—such as third-level assistant secretary posts—“political appointments.”
At the start of Reagan’s second term, without reelection pressures to inspire even nominal equal opportunity efforts, the administration immediately discontinued both the Coalition on Women’s Appointments and the Working Group on Women. Appointed women’s numbers fell even more steeply, and for the first time since 1977, not one woman ranked high enough to attend the daily senior staff meetings or report to the president. At the Justice Department in 1986, Ed Meese had yet to hire a woman as a senior policymaker two years after taking office—in spite of federal regulations requiring the department to set such hiring goals. The Federal Women’s Program, established in 1967 to recruit women to government agencies, was essentially disbanded: its recruitment coordinators at the various federal agencies were either assigned other duties, stripped of their budgets, or quietly laid off. “Each year, our budget has been cut and it was cut again this year,” Betty Fleming, the personnel management specialist who was second in command in the Federal Women’s Program central office in 1991, explains. But, she says, she wasn’t complaining; they didn’t need the funds, because “We’re just going to meet and talk.” Finally, as part of Reagan’s Paperwork Reduction Act, the federal government quit collecting most recruitment statistics on women altogether. Now the federal government could quit seeking women—and no one would be the wiser.
The few women who did slip past the no-girls-allowed sign on the White House lawn didn’t exactly feel at home. U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick had a revelation one day while sitting in the Situation Room, surrounded by a sea of white male faces. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a rodent scurry across the floor. “I thought to myself,” as she later told the Wall Street Journal, “that the mouse was no more surprising a creature to see in the Situation Room than I.” She left government with this conclusion: “Sexism is alive.”
Faith Whittlesey received the “highest” female post on the Reagan White House staff: assistant to the president for public liaison, giving lip service to women’s and children’s issues. The Reagan administration, she asserted, would aid women by seeing to it that men earned a higher “family” wage, so “all those women can go home and look after their own children.” In her 1984 address on women’s status, Whittlesey assured her audience that women’s rights were in good hands in Washington: “I know the president is deeply committed to providing women with the broadest range of options in exercising their choice.” But working at the White House, Whittlesey soon developed doubts about Reagan’s deep commitments—doubts that likely deepened after Don Regan became chief of staff and demoted her post. Like Kirkpatrick, she eventually bailed out. As she headed for the parking lot with her packing boxes the last day, “all I saw was a sea of men coming and going in those cars,” she recalled. “I began to think, ‘Maybe they’re right. Women aren’t welcome in the White House.’”
The New Right women who received political appointments typically landed in posts that either came with inflated titles but no authority or required them to carry out the administration’s most punitive antifeminist policies. Women like Beverly LaHaye wound up in the first group, shunted to such powerless panels as the Family Advisory Board. On the other hand, a series of women were assigned to the Office of Population Affairs to do the administration’s dirty work against emancipated girls and women. First, antiabortion activist Marjory Mecklenburg was charged with promoting the “squeal rule,” a Reagan policy proposal to make clinics blow the whistle on teenage girls who were seeking birth control without parental permission. Jo Ann Gasper, Conservative Digest columnist and editor of The Right Woman, inherited Mecklenburg’s job (Mecklenburg, ironically, was forced out of office after rumors circulated that she was having an extramarital affair with a staff member). Gasper got the thankless task of shutting down domestic violence programs. She, in turn, was replaced by Nabers Cabaniss—most celebrated for her sexual status as a twenty-nine-year-old virgin—who got to promote a Reagan plan to retract federal funding from any clinic staff that so much as mentioned the word abortion.
If the Reagan climate in Washington was chilly for New Right women, it was poisonous for feminists: they became targets of a purge incited by the New Right. When the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 Mandate for Leadership itemized the federal programs it wanted cut or eliminated, on its top priority list was an agency “dominated” by feminists. Of the dozens of government services targeted by the Heritage Foundation, the Women’s Educational Equity Act program was singled out for a uniquely fierce, personal, and sustained assault. Mandate for Leadership demanded the dismemberment of WEEA for one reason only: as its authors explained, WEEA represented an “important resource for the practice of feminist policies and politics.” It was a “top priority item for the feminist network” and espoused “extreme feminist ideology.”
WEEA’s director, Leslie Wolfe, a ten-year civil service veteran who had pioneered government programs to promote women’s education and who was one of the few women to have ascended to G.S. 15 status, enraged the New Right like no other government figure. “I was a ‘known feminist,’” Wolfe says later. “And because WEEA was seen as a ‘feminist group,’ it got treated very differently from other government programs that the New Right disliked.” She was one of the only directors of a federal program that the New Right lobby bothered to single out by name. In a flurry of internal memos, public magazine articles, and radio talks, New Right leaders denounced Wolfe as a “radical feminist,” spread slanderous tales about her professional behavior, and called for her “swift dethronement.”
The program at the center of all this fury was a tiny and underfunded office in the Education Department—the only federal program to promote equal education for girls. WEEA offered small grants to projects supporting nonsexist education and combating sex discrimination in the schools. It had been hailed as “one of the most cost-effective programs in government” by the Association of American Colleges. The woman who first proposed WEEA wasn’t even one of those “radical feminists” from NOW; Arlene Horwitz was a clerical worker in a congressional office, a working woman who understood from personal experience—trying to live off her skimpy paycheck—that unequal schooling could have painful and long-term economic consequences. The projects WEEA funded were hardly radical either: a guide to help teenage handicapped girls; a program to enforce equal education laws in rural school districts; a math-counseling service for older minority women returning to community college.
Nonetheless, to the men of the Heritage Foundation, WEEA was “the feminist network feeding at the federal trough.” Charles Heatherly, Heritage Foundation fellow and the Mandate editor who made this charge at August 1983 hearings before the House Education and Labor Committee and attacked Wolfe most vigorously, later admits that he never dealt “with her personally.” But he had made up his mind about the WEEA director. “She was widely perceived to be a radical feminist,” he explains. And his campaign against Wolfe and WEEA only intensified with Reagan’s election: the new president appointed Heatherly deputy undersecretary of management in the Education Department, putting him in charge of the program.
Heatherly recruited his New Right colleagues, some on staff, others, like Conservative Caucus founder Howard Phillips, as consultants to review the program’s budget. Their mission: wipe out WEEA. They found a sympathetic ear in the White House; soon after his inauguration, Reagan proposed an immediate 25 percent cut of its already approved budget, with total defunding the following year. In Congress, WEEA’s supporters fought back. Led by GOP Representative Margaret Heckler, the program won a reprieve, though not without a 40 percent budget cut.
The New Right leaders weren’t ready to give up after this first round. In the winter and spring of 1982, they pursued a months-long media and letter-writing campaign against Wolfe. Human Events: National Conservative Weekly claimed it had “uncovered” such apparently offensive WEEA grants as an award to the Council on Interracial Books for Children. Conservative Digest, the publication of the Conservative Caucus, attacked Wolfe personally in an anonymously written article by a “concerned employee in the Education Department.” She was guilty, the author asserted, of “twisting the grant approval process,” exercising “near total control,” and using WEEA as a slush fund for NOW and a “money machine for a network of openly radical feminist groups.” Leslie Wolfe was a “monarch,” who was “imperiously guarding her fiefdom.” Again, on a talk show, Howard Phillips accused her of underhandedly funneling money to women’s rights organizations. He complained, too, that she was guilty of insubordination; Wolfe, he said indignantly, once referred to the Education Secretary as “His Wimpiness.”
Just a week after the Conservative Digest broadside, Wolfe was demoted—by memo. WEEA would henceforth be run by a Heatherly appointee, and Wolfe would “serve in an advisory capacity,” the memo informed her. Wolfe wrote back, protesting the decision. She got no response. Finally, three weeks later, Wolfe was summoned to the office of Acting Assistant Secretary Jean Benish—a woman had been picked once again to deliver the bad news to a feminist woman. “You are being temporarily reassigned as of Monday morning to a task force on fraud, waste, and abuse,” Wolfe recalls Benish telling her. “I said, ‘I’m not the right person for that kind of job. My background is education, not fraud.’” The assistant secretary told her she had no choice; this was an emergency and the department needed a “high-level manager” with “outstanding management skills” to handle this important project. She told Wolfe to leave her key on the desk by the end of the day.
When Wolfe reported to her new assignment, however, she found no emergency and no request for a high-level manager. Her new boss did, however, point out that she was lucky to land where she did; Heatherly’s men had considered transferring her to the “Secretarial Certification Program.” Again, WEEA’s congressional supporters protested the administration’s heavy-handed tactics. Finally, three months later, Wolfe was told she could reclaim her old job. But when she returned, she found the halls filled with strangers.
Every year, the program must hire 150 outside field readers to review grant applications—and under the WEEA act, the readers must understand and support educational equity laws and have some educational expertise. In Wolfe’s absence—just one day, in fact, after she was reassigned—Heatherly had thrown out her slate of field readers and installed his own: a group of women from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. “There was a general feeling that there had been too much inbreeding,” Heatherly explains later of the wholesale dismissal. “New faces were needed.” These readers weren’t picked for their enthusiasm for WEEA’s goals. As one of them explained it at the time to her hometown paper, the Tulsa World, she was on her way to Washington to help curb a “feminist agency” that Reagan wanted abolished.
The new field readers, for the most part, neither understood nor supported educational equity. One reader, whose job was to review applications that would help enforce Title IX, asked the panel’s moderator plaintively, “What is Title Nine?” Another woman, who was supposed to be reviewing applications to help disabled women, wanted to know if being a Native American qualified as a “disability.” The field reader considering applications for educational equity projects for minority women was on loan from the infamously discriminatory Bob Jones University. They repeatedly rejected grant proposals to alleviate sex discrimination on the grounds that discrimination never existed. “Do not see the need in project,” wrote one field reader in her evaluation. “Most girls and boys go into fields,” she explained, because “it is [the] way parents bring them up and mostly they are born with certain desires. . . . [I] just disagree with the whole approach.” Another wrote of one grant application, “The title of program concerns me.” Why? It “encourages women not to stay in low-paying jobs but to move up if they desire.” Finally, the General Accounting Office investigated and found that 20 percent of the field readers did not meet a single qualification for their WEEA jobs and most only barely qualified. And the numbers of minority field readers, the GAO noted, had been cut by 75 percent. The auditors’ findings, however, did not discourage the administration from continuing its campaign against WEEA.
A year later, Wolfe was ushered into her boss’s office one last time. Her job had been abolished, she was told, and she would be laid off unless she cared to accept a new assignment: clerk-typist in the Office of Compensatory Education. Wolfe resigned. All five other women on the WEEA staff were fired or reassigned—while all five male employees were retained. With Wolfe gone, the Education Department immediately demoted the office to the bottom of the bureaucracy—and the director’s post to “section chief,” a low-authority classification. The job went to a career civil servant, who herself was demoted two grades to fill the post. “Dethronement,” while not swift, had at last succeeded.
The Department of Education, which had starred in the campaign to usurp the feminists, now directed the effort to crown the fathers. If the “pro-family” movement was “pro” anything, it was paternal power.
The White House based the “family policy” office in the Education Department, a logical enough choice for an administration that viewed “family policy” as a series of didactic lectures, not a program offering the family economic, medical, or legal assistance. As Gary Bauer, who would become the department’s family-policy czar, told civil-rights leaders: “The values taught on the ‘Cosby’ show would do more to help low-income and minority children than a bevy of new federal programs. . . . [A] lot of research indicates that values are much more important, say, than the level of welfare payments.” The values he had in mind weren’t simply familial love and understanding. What Bauer found most edifying about “Cosby” was its depiction of a household where, as he puts it in a later interview, “children respect their father.”
Bauer was having some trouble himself mustering respect from the governmental family he joined in 1981. He entered public service as deputy undersecretary for education with visions of launching a “social revolution” from his desk. But he was ignored by senior Reagan officials, and even his staff wouldn’t mind him; Bauer spent his first two years trying to silence the Education Department’s remaining moderates, who insisted on talking to the press without his permission. Bauer finally advanced to director of the Office of Policy Development, only to discover that the office’s purposes primarily involved public relations. When the administration handed him yet another window-dressing assignment, chairman of the 1986 task force on the family, Bauer exploded. His petulantly worded fifty-two-page report was, as Senator Daniel P. Moynihan remarked at the time, “less a policy statement than a tantrum.”
“The Family: Preserving America’s Future” opens, aptly enough, with a quote from that late Victorian champion of endangered masculinity, Teddy Roosevelt: “If the mother does not do her duty, there will either be no next generation, or a next generation that is worse than none at all.” Bauer’s report proceeds to excoriate all manner of independent women who aren’t doing their duty: women who work, women who use day care, women who divorce, women who have babies out of wedlock. In the world according to Bauer, wives are forever abandoning their husbands and children, throwing away their marriages “like paper towels.” The report justifies this position not with statistics but with a newspaper cartoon, in which a bride tells her groom, “I’m sorry, Sam, I just met my dream man in the reception line.” Even female poverty is the woman’s fault; “more and more,” he writes, female financial problems “result from personal choices” like seeking a divorce or bearing illegitimate children. Of the offspring of these broken homes, Bauer concerns himself only with the fate of the sons (a one-gender fixation typical of New Right writings on the subject). He decries the “far more detrimental effects of divorce on boys than on girls”—as if divorce would matter less if it were the girls who suffered more.
Bauer’s “recommendations” to save the family read more like a list of punishments for girls and mothers: bar young single mothers from public housing; revive old divorce laws to make it harder for women to break the wedding bonds; deny contraceptives to young women. On the other hand, he proposes prizes for women who follow his dictates. Mothers who stay home, he suggests, should get tax breaks; the more babies, the more credits.
• • •
“WE’RE RUNNING at 1.8 children per woman in this country,” Bauer says darkly, on a spring afternoon in the final year of Reagan’s tenure. He is seated in his cramped suite in the White House’s west wing; if square footage is any indicator of federal priorities, saving the family ranks low on this administration’s list.
“That’s below replacement level,” Bauer warns of the impending birth dearth. “There are going to be serious consequences for free society if we continue down this path.” Who’s to blame? “Militant feminists who seemed to hold sway ten years ago couldn’t help but have a negative influence on the family.” The evidence? “Take Kramer vs. Kramer. There’s that poignant letter the mother leaves behind addressed to her son, where she says, ‘That’s not all there is in life. Mommy has to do some other things.’ I think that was a real symbol of the times. An excuse for women to run out on their responsibilities.”
Other than the “irresponsible” behavior of the celluloid Mrs. Kramer—who never actually declared herself a feminist—does Bauer have any other proof that feminism hurt the family? “Look at textbooks,” he offers. “Twenty years ago, women in textbooks were housewives and in the home. Now, you look at a textbook and what’s missing is any sign of women in a nurturing role in the family. Now our daughters are being taught that life is not full unless they’re stewardesses, reporters, etc.”
Bauer says “most women” in America have come to share his views; they “are discovering you can’t have it all. There’s some statistical evidence that women who decided early on to establish a career, and now are getting close to the end of the time they can start a family, feel cheated. Their clock is running out.” Asked to provide this “statistical” evidence, he says that, alas, it isn’t handy.
Even working women whose biological clocks are in working order, Bauer says, “are realizing they’d rather be at home with their children. Most women work only because they have to.” Mothers should stay home for the sake of the children, he says. Children in day care, which he characterizes as “Marxist,” suffer long-term damaging effects—according to “many studies,” he adds. It comes then as a bit of a surprise to learn that Bauer has subjected his own children to this leftist institution—for nine years.
He can explain it, he says. His use of day care was “different” and “better” because he placed his children in “home-based” day care—that is, an unlicensed center run out of a woman’s living room. (It’s unclear how this is better: a national review of child abuse statistics at day care centers finds that the most incidents of abuse have occurred at such unlicensed sites.) At any rate, Bauer says, a bit defensively, it’s not like his kids went directly from the maternity ward to the day care nursery. His wife, Carol, waited “at least three, four months” before she returned to work. “For my wife, it’s been a slow process of concluding you can’t have it all.” Carol Bauer, however, remembers events differently.
“Actually, I went back to work six weeks after Elyse was born,” says his wife, sitting at their dining room table on a spring morning in 1988, picking absentmindedly at bread crumbs on the tablecloth. The children are out—the older ones at school, the youngest in a “mother’s day off” program.
At the time of her daughter Elyse’s birth in 1977, Carol Bauer explains, she was a top assistant to Congresswoman Margaret Heckler; she couldn’t just quit. A lack of federal assistance programs for mothers also played a role in her decision: “There’s no set leave policy on the Hill,” she points out. Financial considerations entered into it, too: “We had bought a house and we had a mortgage.” And then there was that other impulse that she just couldn’t seem to squelch: “It wasn’t just economics. I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of the work. I loved work.” She laughs. “I mean, when I had Elyse, I literally took my work with me. After I got out of the hospital, I was working the next day at home.”
For years, at eight o’clock every morning, the Bauers dropped off Elyse, and eventually their second daughter, Sarah, at day care, put in a full day of work, and then picked up the girls on the way home, usually after six o’clock. The children spent so much time at day care, in fact, Carol Bauer says, that when it came time for Elyse to enter kindergarten, they enrolled her in the school in the center’s neighborhood rather than their own. How did the girls feel about day care? “Oh, fine,” Carol Bauer says. “They were very happy there. For them it was normal.”
What’s been harder is Carol Bauer’s own adaptation to full-time homemaking. National politics had been her obsession since childhood, when she kept scrapbooks of the presidential elections and proudly wore her Republican campaign buttons to school. At Muskingum College in Ohio, she majored in political science and had the Washington Post mailed to her dorm room. “I had Potomac fever,” she recalls. “I just couldn’t wait to get to Washington. I wanted a career. You know, I guess I wanted a family, too, eventually, but what I was really dreaming of was a career in politics.”
After graduation, she headed for the capital and moved from research assistant in the Republican National Committee to an appointment in Heckler’s congressional office, where she rose quickly to the top executive post. She was especially pleased to be on the staff of one of the few congresswomen. “There was something about working for a woman who had managed to do it all,” she says. When Heckler took charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, Carol Bauer came with her in a part-time position. But then the Reagan administration forced Heckler from office. The new HHS Secretary, Otis Bowen, asked Bauer to stay and help with the transition. She agreed—but with her role model and her power base gone, the job soon lost its appeal. “That was the most difficult part of my career,” she says. “One day you’re the top aide to the secretary, the next day you’re not part of the in-crowd anymore. I felt like something akin to a fifth wheel.” He also refused to give her the flexible schedule she had had under Heckler. Finally, she quit in the late fall of 1986—announcing that her children needed her at home.
But nesting, she has discovered, has its trials. “It was a long winter,” she says of her first season at home. “It was quite an adjustment.” She pauses. “It still is.” The first months were the worst: “I felt rather isolated. I was so used to going to Washington.” She tried to make the best of her new circumstances. “By last spring I decided if I’m going to be home, I would have to get involved in other things. So this school year, I’m in the Mantua Women’s Club; I’m on the board of the baby-sitting co-op, I do PTA work. It gives me some satisfaction.” She shrugs. “Also, I still talk to my office. And I pump Gary for information every night at dinner.”
This year, she says, her eldest daughter, Elyse, is running for president of student council. And the other day, Sarah came home from first grade, modeling what Carol Bauer calls “my dream T-shirt.” Her daughter had inscribed it in art class with her life’s goals: “Go to college. Practice. Get a job.”
Gary Bauer never made much headway with his legislative program to promote homemaking. The $5,000 personal tax exemption he envisioned for families with housewives would have cost the deficit-stricken government about $20 billion a year in lost tax revenues. But while New Right men like Bauer lost many of their bureaucratic battles, they would eventually win the war for the national political agenda. In that struggle, the 1984 presidential election figured as a crucial turning point—the Democratic party’s last stand for women’s rights.
By nominating Representative Geraldine Ferraro to the vice presidential spot on the ticket, the Democrats boldly advertised to women the clear differences between the parties. The measure did not go unappreciated; it earned the Democrats new support from millions of female voters, who contributed more money to Ferraro’s campaign fund than women had ever donated to any candidate’s coffers. In fact, for the first time, a Democratic vice presidential candidate received as much in political contributions as the candidate at the top of the ticket. The Democratic National Committee added 26,000 new names to its rolls, the largest campaign-year increase ever spurred by a single candidate. And Ferraro’s presence encouraged other aspiring female politicians. The number of women running for Senate more than tripled and the number of female congressional candidates jumped to a record high.
Ferraro’s nomination also inspired instantaneous backlash from the New Right Reaganites, who attacked her not as a politician but as a woman—and, more specifically, as a “radical left-wing feminist.” Before the TV cameras, they repeatedly suggested that her gender would render her incapable of defending the nation. Behind the scenes, they launched a series of whispering campaigns, all focused on her sexuality. “There were rumors about me being involved in lesbianism,” Ferraro recalls, “about me having affairs, about me having an abortion.” The leaders of the antiabortion movement pursued her with vindictiveness. They even followed her around in a blimp.
Though many political candidates in the ’80s were subjected to harsh attacks and close scrutiny, the assault on Ferraro was unprecedented: It wasn’t her behavior that was on trial, but her husband John Zaccaro’s; she was to be punished for his management of some muddy New York real estate deals. Ferraro herself was no promoter of that profession—in fact, the Realtors association had given her an 88 percent disapproval rating. She was excoriated for her husband’s reluctance to disclose his tax returns—while Bush was unscathed after placing his own assets in a blind trust, thus avoiding having to reveal his tax returns. Rumors about Zaccaro’s improprieties were floated first by the New Right magazine Human Events and the right-wing Accuracy in Media. The Washington press corps probed the business practices of this small-time landlord as if he would soon be managing the White House budget. And reporters applied themselves with a perseverance that was to be notably absent four years later in the reporting on George Bush’s role in the Iran-Contra affair. The Philadelphia Inquirer assigned thirty reporters to the Zaccaro story. Even after Ferraro released her family’s tax returns and reviewed them in excruciating detail at a one-and-a-half-hour nationally televised news conference, investigations of “her” finances persisted, ranging far afield of her bank account. The press even looked into long-ago business associations of Ferraro’s father (dead since she was eight) and Ferraro’s husband’s father. As columnist Richard Reeves, one of the few journalists to step back from the fray, remarked at the time, “The stoning of Geraldine Ferraro in the public square goes on and on, and no one steps forward to help or protest—not even one of her kind.”
In the end, as myriad postelection polls demonstrated, neither the scandal over Zaccaro’s business affairs nor Ferraro’s presence on the ticket contributed to the Democrats’ defeat. A recovering economy returned the White House to Republican hands. Nearly 80 percent of voters polled by Newsweek said the flap over Ferraro’s husband did not figure in their voting decision. Voters weren’t rejecting the possibility of a woman in high office either. In fact, a national survey after the 1984 election found that having seen Ferraro on the campaign trail, one-quarter of the electorate was now more inclined to vote for a female candidate. Moreover, exit polls found that among voters who cast their ballot on the basis of the second person on the ticket, Ferraro had the edge over Vice President Bush.
But history has a way of rewriting itself: “Polling indicated that she detracted from, rather than added to, Mondale’s electoral strength,” an article in the National Review decreed a year after the campaign. It did not cite these mystery polls. Other political analysts in the media characterized Ferraro’s appearance on the ticket as the Democratic “surrender” to feminists—and they blamed these feminists for making Mondale look “weak” to the electorate. Democratic party leaders charged that women were responsible for the party’s poor showing and women had had too much influence in the campaign and were driving away white men. Writer Nicholas Davidson asserted that Mondale “was under the gun from feminists—far more so than from other constituencies. Such was the feminist stick.” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen complained that Mondale had been “henpecked” and had succumbed to “the hectoring and—yes—threats of the organized women’s movement.” He has been reduced to “a stock American wimp” and “might as well sit out the campaign in an easy chair, munching a Dagwood sandwich.”
Eventually, Ferraro would internalize much of this revisionist history, too—and turn on herself. In subsequent press interviews, Ferraro said that if she had it to do over, she wouldn’t have run for office. Accepting the nomination wasn’t “fair” to her husband, she said. And she backed off from plans to run for the Senate in 1986.
“[T]he defeat of one woman is often read as a judgment on all women,” Ferraro wrote in her memoirs. And indeed, her rough experience during the campaign and her much publicized regrets later translated similarly in the minds of many American women. In 1984, 53 percent of women in a national poll said they believed a woman would be president by the year 2000; in 1987, only 40 percent expected it. Women who aspired to a career in politics were even more demoralized by Ferraro’s public drubbing. By 1988, recruiters from both parties suddenly encountered difficulties finding women willing to run for office. The bipartisan Women’s Campaign Fund had trouble giving away its seed money. Ruth Mandel, director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics, kept hearing potential women candidates beg off with the same reason; they feared “the Ferraro factor.” The popular California secretary of state, March Fong Eu, backed away from a U.S. Senate bid that year on the Democratic ticket. Her reason: her husband didn’t want to have to disclose his finances like Ferraro’s husband.
On Election Day, only two women (both Republicans) were on the ballot in the 1988 U.S. Senate race, down from ten in 1984. It was the smallest number of women running for Senate in a decade. On the House side, the number of female candidates slipped, too. And in every category of statewide executive races—from governor to lieutenant governor to secretary of state to state treasurer to state auditor—women’s numbers plunged. Female gubernatorial candidates, for example, dropped to two, from eight just two years earlier. Only in state legislative races did the number of women running increase slightly—and even here, the growth rate had dropped substantially from previous years.
When the election results came in for 1988, both women who ran for U.S. Senate had lost, leaving the Senate with its usual two women. (The last time women broke out of that holding pattern was in 1953—when the Senate boasted a grand total of three women.) On the House side, only two new women were elected in 1988, down from four in 1986. Overall, the percentage of women in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures had stalled, and the proportion of women in statewide elective office had shrunk to 12 percent from 15 percent just a year earlier—the first decline in eleven years.
• • •
ON A bitterly cold morning in January 1988 in Des Moines, Iowa, more than one thousand delegates gathered in the city’s convention center for the Women’s Agenda Conference. The women were there to make their wishes known to the presidential hopefuls. But candidates were scarce. Not one of the six men in the Republican presidential primary showed up for the conference’s central event, the Presidential Forum; and only two even bothered to decline their invitations. Two of the Democrats were also absent: Gary Hart and Albert Gore. It wasn’t that this was a “radical feminist” event: the bipartisan conference was sponsored by the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, a national association with a moderate reputation and a majority Republican membership. It wasn’t that the timing or location was bad: the candidates were all milling about Iowa in January for the primary, desperate for publicity. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been given enough notice: The invitations had been sent out the previous June. It wasn’t that the candidates had more pressing commitments: one of them even went fishing that day. That left only one explanation. As the organization’s executive director, Republican Linda Dorian, reluctantly concluded, “There is something deeply troubling about the way Republican candidates view women.”
Mostly, the 1988 Republican candidates preferred not to view women at all. They represented a growing Republican problem that the party’s leaders would just as soon not spotlight. The “gender gap” appeared in the 1980 election, when for the first time more women than men favored the Democrats (by a 5 to 7 percent margin), and Gallup polls began reporting that the Democratic party was enjoying as much as a 19 percent edge among women. On the top of the ticket on Election Day, exit polls found, men and women parted company: a majority of men (55 percent) cast their ballot for Reagan, but only a minority of women (47 percent). The split along gender lines was greater than in any previous presidential election—and striking enough to inspire Reagan to commission pollster Richard Wirthlin to investigate how to combat it in the next election.
That same year, in an unprecedented fissure that went unnoted in the press, a feminist gap also emerged. Women’s rights, in fact, would become the only issue on which Carter led Reagan in the polls. The first substantial feminist vote surfaced—and, as political scientist Ethel Klein observed in her study of national voting patterns, it was a vote that surfaced only among women. It was “the first election,” Klein noted, “in which there was a group of voters having a preferred candidate on women’s rights issues that could be mobilized around a feminist vote.” By 1988, in fact, a remarkable 40 percent of women who favored equal rights said in a poll that they would like to have a “feminist party.” The greatest fear of suffrage’s opponents sixty years ago was finally threatening to come true: a significant number of women were beginning to constitute a bloc of voters who cast their ballots independently of men.
As the decade progressed, the gender gap widened—for Reagan, at times, by as much as 17 percent—and, with it, women’s power to sway elections. By 1984, female votes decided more elections than men’s. By 1986, the gender gap returned the Senate to Democratic control; in nine critical Senate races, women favored the Democrat who won, men the Republicans who lost. In 1988, the gender gap would be a factor in over forty state elections. The gender gap’s effect was further strengthened by women’s increasingly large numerical edge at the polls. Female voters outnumbered men in 1980 by 5.5 million votes; by 1984, for the first time a higher proportion of women than men voted; by 1988, women were casting 10 million more ballots than men.
By 1988 the voting preferences of men and women had diverged so much that at one point in the presidential race, polls picked up a 24 percent gender gap in favor of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. It was single women, whether unwed, divorced, or widowed, who contributed most dramatically to the gap, along with working, educated, professional, young, and black women. In other words, Dukakis’s supporters who gave him this huge female advantage were women who most supported a feminist agenda of pay equity, social equality, and reproductive rights.
GOP leaders weren’t oblivious to this threat: Republican chairman Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., warned his colleagues during the 1988 presidential race, “We are particularly vulnerable, if I can use that word, among young women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five who work outside the home and particularly within that subgroup, those young women who are single parents.” This shouldn’t have come as a surprise: female-headed households had suffered disproportionately from Reagan domestic policy, losing billions of dollars in desperately needed child care assistance, medical aid, legal services, nurtritional supplements, and subsidized housing.
One solution, of course, would have been for the Republicans to try to win over this expanding female, and feminist, vote by pursuing progressive social policies—policies that the majority of American women clearly supported. Instead, GOP leaders cold-shouldered women and chased twice as desperately after men. None took positions that the majority of women support—from the right to abortion to social welfare funding to the Equal Rights Amendment. And those who once did take such stances were busy recanting them. Bush, Robert Dole, and Pete Du Pont all backed away from previous, more profeminist postures. Bush used to support the ERA, legal abortion, and federally funded birth-control services. The very federal contraceptive program he would attack in the ’80s, in fact, was the one he had co-sponsored as a congressman in 1970—with the pronouncement then, “No one has to feel timid about discussing birth control anymore.” Now, though, Bush and Republican party officials shied away from all but the most symbolic, and empty, expressions of support for women. At the 1988 Republican National Convention, the party’s officers paid homage to women in one respect only: they gave out plaques to four good mothers, including Representative Jack Kemp’s wife Joanne, who had put their careers on hold when they had children.
Rather than meeting the demands of women, the GOP men struck macho stands that they hoped would impress their own sex. Bush hoped especially to prove his manly mettle to members of the press corps, who seemed as obsessed with the “wimp factor” as the male politicians they were covering. “I get furious,” Bush assured them. “I go ballistic. I really do and I bawl people out. Of course, everyone’s running for cover.” He even predicted, more wistfully than assertively, “Maybe I’ll turn out to be a Teddy Roosevelt.”
During the race, Bush’s campaign managers dismissed questions about women’s rights; they were too trivial to warrant comment, they said. “We’re not running around and dealing with a lot of so-called women’s issues,” Bush’s press secretary indignantly told the New York Times. When Bush summoned a group of elected officials to advise him during the campaign, only one was a woman. While the candidate claimed that opposition to abortion was a cornerstone of his campaign, he didn’t give this critical concern of women’s much apparent thought. When asked in a televised debate if he was “prepared to brand a woman a criminal for this decision,” he said, “I haven’t sorted out the penalties.” His one seeming nod in the direction of working women’s needs during the campaign was a penny-ante child care proposal that would give the poorest working families about $20 a week in tax breaks. This pocket change was supposed to pay for basic child care that, on average, costs four times as much. In the end, the Bush campaign’s only real gesture to women was, incredibly, the selection of Dan Quayle. His youthful blond looks, Republican leaders told journalists, would surely charm the ladies.
The Democrats would seem the obvious beneficiaries of women’s deepening alienation from the Republican party. (Indeed, the 1988 Los Angeles Times Mirror survey on the electorate found the biggest proportion of women defined themselves as 1960s-style Democrats, identifying with ’60s-era peace and civil rights movements; the smallest proportion of men, by contrast, identified with this group.) Yet, by 1988, Democratic candidates and leaders were so preoccupied with proving their macho credentials and adopting their “pro-family” strategy that they nearly wiped women’s rights off the party slate. Paul Kirk, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, announced that such “narrow” issues as the Equal Rights Amendment and the right to abortion—both supported by large majorities of American voters—had no place on the party platform. Then he tried to disband the party’s women’s caucuses—after explicitly promising during his campaign for chairman that he wouldn’t. Meanwhile, the Democratic Leadership Council quietly omitted abortion rights from its agenda.
In 1984, when women were still being courted by the Democrats, the Democratic National Committee held a gala dinner party to honor its women, and every presidential candidate spoke before the national women’s caucuses. In 1988, the party for Democratic women was literally over. Not only was there no honorary banquet that year, during the four days of the women’s caucuses, no presidential candidates showed up. Dukakis sent his wife; and his running mate, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, was the only prominent male figure to address the women. In Dukakis’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, he did not once mention reproductive freedom. Nor, for that matter, did he take a position on sex discrimination, pay equity, or the ERA. He didn’t offer even a vague endorsement of women’s rights. The closest he came was an allusion to the importance of child care. Like his Republican fellows, he could envision women only when they were tucked snugly into the family unit.
By turning his back on women, Dukakis managed to turn off his greatest source of support. The 24 percent gender gap that he enjoyed that summer quickly shriveled to less than 8 percent by Election Day. Only then, after the votes had all been counted, did Bush’s men talk about the gap—to claim Dukakis’s failure as their success. “The major accomplishment of Bush/Quayle was the closing of the gender gap,” Bush’s polling consultant, Vince Breglio, crowed later. “It was critical to winning.” Breglio claimed the GOP won women over by playing up child care and a “kinder, gentler” agenda. But the exit polls show this victory to be a less than resounding one; Bush got 49 to 50 percent of the female vote, not a real majority, and women’s affiliation with the GOP party actually fell an additional four percentage points in 1988. (Only 26 percent of women were calling themselves Republicans in the polls that year.) The GOP party only “won” the battle over the gender gap by default. Dukakis, for all his muscle-man flexing, never once summoned the courage to punch through Bush’s family-values facade. Donna Brazile, the one member of Dukakis’s campaign staff who dared to comment in public about the possible hypocrisy lurking behind Bush’s family-man show, was fired for her frankness—and a nervous Dukakis hastily apologized to Bush for his aide’s indiscretion.
Far from protesting their candidate’s desertion of the female population, most women in the Democratic party seemed to be studying to be ladies, by suffering in silence. When a few women at the caucuses dared to challenge Bentsen for his poor record on women’s issues, their inquiries were immediately shushed—by other women in the room. When feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich approached a prominent female politician about sponsoring a bill on women’s economic rights, she was told to forget it. “We’re not doing ‘women’s issues’ anymore,” the politician’s aide told Ehrenreich—before she even had a chance to describe the proposal. “We’re doing ‘family issues.’”
Such traditional “feminine” protestations recall the demurrals of second-generation suffragists in the early 20th century. They, too, tried the ladylike strategy; they quit speaking of the need for equality and began claiming that they only wanted to be the guardians of motherhood and domesticity, the “housekeepers” of national politics. Their genteel redecorating efforts even papered over the centerpiece—the women’s vote became the “Home Protection” ballot. Nearly a century later, their counterparts in Washington politics would wrap themselves once more in the family flag. Women’s political groups began billing themselves, first and foremost, as maternal champions; they launched a Great American Family Tour and a “Family Matters” survey, kicked off by a TV special featuring “thirtysomething”’s maternal goddess, Hope Steadman. In a final press mailing a few days before the election, the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Vote Project issued a thick packet that focused with virtual exclusivity on “family” issues. Women should go to the polls, the enclosures instructed, because “America’s Families Need Our Votes.” What about what American women needed? The packet didn’t say.
Protecting the interests of families and children, of course, belongs in any comprehensive vision of social welfare. And the efforts of women’s groups to aid the family were legitimate, necessary—and far more sincere than the “save the family” cant recited by so many disingenuous presidential candidates. (“I do hope we can move on to matters of importance and stop playing games with this parental leave and child care,” Senate Republican leader Bob Dole griped in Congress—the same year he was running for president under a pro-family banner.) But by allowing themselves to be restricted to family issues alone, women in politics wound up hamstrung and pigeonholed. By “choosing” to neglect women’s issues for the sake of the family cause, female politicians succumbed to yet another of the backlash’s you-can’t-have-it-all axioms. Women could only ask for child care and parental leave by not asking for educational opportunities, pay equity, and reproductive freedom. Not only was this unfair, the half-a-loaf strategy didn’t even work. All the child care and parental leave bills that year were defeated.
As the “pro-family” ideology expanded into the center of American politics, it pushed women to the fringes. By the end of the decade, the vanishing act had become so accepted that it barely attracted notice. While women’s status in politics received a tangible amount of press coverage in early-’80s election news, the media’s interest evaporated by the decade’s final presidential race. The day after the election, the Washington Post ran a fourteen-page special election section; it included nothing on women. In the week after the 1988 election, the New York Times devoted more than thirty pages to reviewing and analyzing the electoral results. Only two paragraphs, in the last column of a general story on political trends, mentioned the gender gap—even though the gap decided at least five House seats, evicted several GOP congressmen, and cleaved voting patterns in congressional elections overall (with a majority of women voting for Democrats, a majority of men for Republicans). While a raft of articles probed the election results from the vantage of every conceivable interest group, no story focused on the fate of female candidates. So, not only did the numbers of women elected to national political offices shrink, the public was never informed of this serious setback to American women in politics.
In January 1989, days after Bush’s inauguration and exactly a year after the first Women’s Agenda Conference, female politicians and activists assembled for the conference’s second session. Even though Bush hadn’t bothered to show up last year, the delegates were still hopeful. Prominent women in politics predicted that Bush would now drop the campaign’s opportunistic antifeminist veneer and show his true colors as a champion of women. But Bush turned down his invitation to speak yet again, sending a videotape this time. On it, he promised “to keep talking” to the women. Of course, on tape he’d never hear their side of the conversation.
The summer after the election, the National Organization for Women met in Cincinnati, just three weeks after the Supreme Court’s famous Webster decision restricting women’s right to an abortion, and just as the Bush administration was applauding the court’s historic retreat from reproductive choice. Some NOW delegates, weary of what they saw as an endless round of betrayals of women by both political parties, proposed the convention talk about forming a third party, one that would, among other causes, champion women’s equality. The motion passed unanimously.
The press, which generally ignored NOW conventions, exploded with outrage, anger, and derision. “Not NOW—It’s Time for Consensus, not Conflict,” ordered the Washington Post’s Outlook editor Jodie Allen in an opinion piece. “Somebody has to say it, Molly Yard [NOW president], shut up.” As for the rest of the NOW leadership, the editor ordered, “[R]ework your act or bow off the stage.” The dozens of other editorial temper tantrums were little different. Some sample headlines: “NOW Puts Her Worst Foot Forward,” “NOW’s Fantasy,” and “NOW’s Flirtation With Suicide.” Newsweek warned that “the shrill voices of NOW” could destroy the pro-choice movement and quoted an anonymous attendee of the conference, who supposedly said, “I wish we could take out a contract on Molly Yard.” (Given that the conference gave unanimous support to the third-party proposal, this dissenter’s identity is something of a mystery.)
In its overheated response to the proposal, the press managed to get the story all wrong. They accused NOW president Molly Yard of foisting the third-party idea on the convention delegates, but grass-roots delegates came up with the proposal in a workshop, proposed it, and passed it—while a startled NOW leadership stood and watched. The leaders, in fact, had proposed a much more modest work-inside-the-party plan; Yard had only suggested calling for gender balance on the two parties’ slates. And these delegates were hardly the “rabid radicals” that the media conjured: because it wasn’t an election year for NOW’s leadership, many longtime activists and members from the more liberal East and West coasts had stayed home. The delegates dominating this conference were midwestern, middle American women; in fact, an unusually large proportion of them had joined NOW for the first time that year. Further, their resolution didn’t even call for a new party—only for “an exploratory commission” to consider the possibility of having one. And the party the delegates wished to consider wasn’t even, as the press had dubbed it, a “woman’s party;” the delegates defined it broadly as a human-rights party that would confront racial inequality, poverty, pollution, and militarism, too.
The phobic response from the press corps and members of the political establishment—who, from the president to the Democratic National Committee chairman to the governors of Maine and Michigan, provided a bountiful supply of condemnatory quotes—was even more ludicrously out of proportion when one recalls that half of the last forty-nine presidential elections have all been three-party elections, seemingly without damage to the American political process. No editorial writers proposed taking a contract out on John Anderson or Barry Commoner when they made their third-party bids just eight years earlier. (It might also be pointed out that the Republican party itself began life as a third party and elected Lincoln in a four-party race.) That an almost timidly worded proposal could generate such fury stunned NOW leaders. “I mean, normally we have to really work for the press to pay even the slightest attention!” a baffled Eleanor Smeal, former NOW president, says. “For the president of the United States of America to mention the NOW resolution [in a TV interview] is unfathomable, incredible! . . . The only thing I can conclude is that many of the powers-that-be are worried.”
The hail of disdain poured on NOW’s third-party proposal achieved its aim: extinguishing the spark of an idea before it had a chance to spread. Leaders of one women’s rights organization after another rushed to the public podium to prove their personal distaste for the women’s party—often in ladylike language. Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, even called reporters while she was on vacation to say that she opposed the third-party plan, because she didn’t want the many “friends” of women in the GOP and Democratic parties “to feel like we’re going to abandon them.” This was a far different response from 1980, when feminist leaders used the third-party card to force the Democratic party to support a full women’s rights agenda: they threatened then to endorse independent candidate John Anderson if the Democratic party didn’t put the ERA, abortion rights, and child care on its agenda.
The intense mockery that the third-party idea provoked should have tipped off women in politics to the equally intense insecurity such taunts concealed. Smeal was probably right; the powers-that-be were worried. The political establishment had to deride NOW’s proposal as “cockeyed” and “silly” because it was in fact neither—it was credible and threatening. After all, of all the battles that Bush faced in the ’88 race, it was the candidate’s successful combat against the gender gap that his advisers singled out as the “major accomplishment” of his campaign. “Is it all over for white males?” asked veteran newsman David Brinkley, floating the question nervously on the air as he anchored NBC’s television coverage of the 1988 Democratic national convention. Political commentator George Will returned a gaze of equal consternation and replied, yes, it did seem they were witnessing “the eclipse of the white male.” Behind them, a Democratic podium was awash in a sea of white male faces—but that hardly mattered to the two male pundits.
By the close of the decade, it didn’t require an overactive imagination to sense the anger and alienation of the majority of American women—first cheated by the Reagan administration, then shut out of the 1988 presidential campaign and finally demoralized by the Webster decision restricting abortion. Women’s anger was, in fact, surfacing in spectacular ways in the national polls. A 1989 Yankelovich Clancy Shulman survey found that a majority of women believed both the Democratic and Republican parties were “out of touch with the average American woman.” And who did they believe was “in touch”? A majority of women cited the following three groups: NOW, the leaders of the women’s rights movement, and feminists. When analyzed by age, the Yankelovich survey results painted a grim picture indeed for the future status of the Democratic and Republican parties: younger women in the poll identified the least of any age group with the traditional parties—and the most with feminist groups and leaders. Among women twenty-two to twenty-nine years old, only 36 percent believed Republicans were in touch with the average woman; on the other hand, 73 percent of these young women said NOW was in touch with their needs. The youngest women, sixteen to twenty-one, weighed in with the most overwhelming figures—83 percent of them believed NOW spoke for them.
By the close of the decade, women could have constituted an immensely powerful voting bloc—if only women’s-rights and other progressive leaders had mobilized their vast numbers. But in the 1980s, the backlash in the capital kept this historic political opportunity for women in check—with a steady strafing of ostracism, hostility, and ridicule. The women most discouraged by this bombardment, understandably, were the ones in closest range. And so, just as the middle American women at NOW’s midwestern convention were ready to take action, many of their female leaders in Washington were running for cover.