Women in Politics, 1984 vs. 2011

Aviva Dove-Viebahn has a column up at TNR today that bizarrely makes the claim that:

Ferraro’s nomination signified hope—a hope that a country mired in institutionalized misogyny could one day see its way to true equality between the sexes. Now, 27 years later, her death compels me to wonder whether we’ve seen much progress.

True equality may not be here yet, but if she's really wondering about progress, she needs to learn a lot more about what the American political system was like in 1984 compared to how it is now.

Why was Gerry Ferraro -- a Member of the House with relatively little experience and what turned out to be real vulnerabilities -- the person Walter Mondale selected to be the first woman on a national ticket? Mainly because there were so few alternatives. In 1984 (all facts from CAWP):

There were two women in the Senate, matching the then all-time high. Both were Republicans. Over the three election cycles leading up to 1984, the Democrats nominated a grand total of four women for the U.S. Senate. Currently, 17 women serve in the Senate (12 Democrats).

Governors? There was one woman out of 50 in 1984, a Democrat who had just taken office that year. In the previous three election cycles, the Democrats had nominated a total of three women for governor (and the GOP hadn't nominated one since 1974). Currently, there are six women servings as governors, down from a high point of nine.

In the House, Ferraro was Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus -- the only woman in a leadership role in either party, and one that Democrats had traditionally held by a woman, at least sometimes, since the 1940s; no woman from either party had ever held any other party leadership position in Congress. Nor were any women chairs of a House committee. Nada. Things, of course, are different now (especially for the Democrats).

In 1984, there had been one female Supreme Court Justice ever; there are three now. There had never been a woman at the top of any of the big four cabinet departments (State, Defense, Justice, Treasury).

I suppose I should also mention that women now serve in senior military posts, too.

Yes, it's true that women who run for office are still attacked in ways that, as Dove-Viebahn says, amount to basically thinly veiled sexist stereotypes. The golden age of perfect equality isn't here...indeed, it's not unreasonable to take a pessimistic view of where we are now, although my tendency is to be more optimistic. But to say that there's no progress, or little progress, or in any way to diminish the differences between 1984 and 2011 is to really miss a major, significant shift. Back then, Ferraro was one of at best a half-dozen of even somewhat plausible candidates for VP, and all of them were going to raise legitimate (not, that is, gender-related) questions about their qualifications. That's never going to be the case again.

Geraldine Ferraro

She was, in one sense, one of a group of terrible VP selections...although not, I think, as bad as Nixon, Agnew, Quayle, and Palin. She was selected out of nowhere, and the vetting missed important things that made her ride in 1984 a very bumpy one.

Not that it mattered, of course, as far as winning or losing in November that year. And, in my view at least, she handled the process well. Despite both her own rocky candidacy and the ticket doing badly, I don't recall anyone then or later ever pointing to Gerry Ferraro as a reason that women shouldn't, or even weren't, advancing nationally.

She never, unfortunately, found a way to build on it. Her Senate campaigns were as uninspired as Nixon's gubernatorial campaign (or Quayle's presidential run) were, and I found her TV appearances or op-ed columns mostly lightweight (at least until the 2008 Democratic primaries, about which the less said the better). My best guess is that she was just badly miscast as a national figure, but probably, as far as I know, would have been at least a solid and perhaps an excellent Member of the House. She certainly could have remained in her seat as long as she liked, and it's hardly impossible to imagine her as Speaker had the cards dropped right (not, to be sure, an original observation, there, but one that's important in understanding her career). Among other things, her career is a reminder that even the best of Congressional insiders (and few are the equal of Tip O'Neill, Ferraro's big supporter in 1984) have a history of utter cluelessness when it comes to presidential politics.

But then again, in 1984 there weren't all that many women available (or at least logical choices) to be the First Woman Vice Presidential Nominee.

All in all, I think that as much as it was in some ways a bad choice, in more important ways Walter Mondale made a good-enough choice.

She was, all in all, a great American, and she deserves to be remembered warmly.