NOW: No Time Like the Present : Eleanor Smeal Calls for ‘Feminization of Power,’ Encourages Delegates at California Conference to Start Campaigning for a Larger Field of Women Candidates in ’88

SAN FRANCISCO —  Eleanor Smeal, the National Organization for Womens’ fiery president, had come to NOW’s state conference over the weekend with this message about 1988: “It’s time to flood the ticket with women and feminists, every inch of the way from the top to the bottom.”

She has had enough, she told delegates, of the “keep us in our place” attitude--”It’s time for us to get mad . . . it’s time for women and feminists to take power.”

No sooner had Smeal finished speaking than Benita Berkson of San Diego NOW came forward to tell Smeal she had just decided to run for the 77th Assembly District seat now held by Republican Larry Sterling. “I’ve been sitting on the fence for a couple of months,” Berkson said, citing money and time concerns, but “Ellie really pushed me over the edge. She made me feel the responsibility.”

Berkson, 52, and the mother of two daughters, said, “When I was growing up the only choice I had was to be a wife.”

Smeal was pleased. The message had gotten through.

This is no time, Smeal had told delegates, “to be reasonable or rational” or to carefully assess chances of winning. “We’ve got to get the intensity up,” she said.

The “feminization of power” is the name of the game, Smeal said, and with only two women among the 100 U.S. Senators, a House that is only 15% women and a California State Legislature that is only 15% women she figures there is not much to lose.

“Each year,” she said, “only 60 women run for Congress,” which has 435 seats. “What if 250 ran, or 300?” Isn’t it possible she asked, that the number of women in the House might double. Perhaps, she acknowledged, there would be a “disappointing number of winners” but the fact of record numbers of candidates would change the nature of political debate and cause some incumbents to “start looking over their shoulders . . . when people think a woman can run against them they become amazingly more feminist.”

Later, asked if she would accept a draft to run for President on a third party feminist slate, Smeal said, “I’m not going to say no to anything. I want a feminist candidate. There’s going to be a feminist candidate. I don’t think it would end up being me.”

That could mean either a feminist on a Democratic ticket or a third party candidacy, Smeal said, and although NOW has been exploring the latter, and she senses “a tremendous desire for another party,” that would “not necessarily be my first choice. I think it’s more likely that we’ll have a feminist candidate in the Democratic Party. But I wouldn’t rule out the other.”

She mentions as possible candidates Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) and Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Feminists are fed up she said, with having their issues perceived as “soft ball” issues. “We’re not going to stay in a little box that someone else has defined as women’s issues,” she said--it is time for NOW to take on “the boys’ issues.”

That means “thinking globally,” Smeal said, thinking of “women’s issues” not only as the human issues, such as health care and child care, but also peace and military spending and unemployment.

Is the nation ready for a women presidential candidate? “Frankly, yes,” Smeal said, both because people “feel disappointed in the crop (of candidates) that is out there now” and “because of the scandals. There’s a huge mess.”

She mentioned the Iran- contra controversy, sex and the television ministry and shady dealings on Wall Street. Then she smiled and said that, while in the wake of all this “feminists have more credibility than ever, in all fairness we never saw the depths of all this.”

Shireen Miles, reelected Saturday to lead California NOW for another two years, has a favorite lapel button: “Women Were Not Born Democrates, Republicans, or Yesterday.”

“To put it frankly,” Miles said in a preconference interview, feminists are “enraged” by signals that the Democratic party “may be abandoning its traditional support for women’s issues, especially reproductive rights. And we intend to keep them honest.”

In the California legislature, Miles noted, “There’s a crew of about seven or eight Democrats who make us wonder what being a Democrat is all about . . . we’re saying ‘don’t take us for granted.’ ”

She mentions, for one, state Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), who has raised feminists’ ire with his support of restrictions on public funding of abortions, which is a major issue in the debate taking place in Sacramento on a new state budget.

One being mentioned frequently to oppose Roberti is Los Angeles lawyer Gloria Allred. Although she is not a declared candidate, Allred said late last week, “I can’t rule it out at this time.”

California NOW, Miles said, is also looking at other candidates to target, inluding Assemblyman Phillip L. Isenberg (D-Sacramento), a liberal who this year introduced a bill that would establish a parental veto that would restrict minors’ access to abortion. “He ran against a woman and we supported him,” Miles said, “because he ran as the feminist candidate. He is now taking the lead in opposing us.”

Said Smeal, “It’s nonsense that some white man is the only person who can lead us, especially when all of their feet of clay have been exposed.

“They make all women lightweights. The political consultants dismiss us because we don’t know anything about foreign policy. Well, (New York Governor) Mario Cuomo has no foreign policy, either.”

When Miles talks about “front and center” issues for California NOW, she lists first legislation to put teeth in the 1982 Sex Equity in Education Act. NOW is sponsoring a bill in the Senate, SB 724, that would require future California teachers, administrators and counselors to complete course work on state and federal anti-discrimination laws.

“Educational equity has fallen out of vogue,” Miles said, since 1984 when the Grove City College Decision narrowed the interpretation of Title IX, specifying that only a particular activity receiving federal funding is restricted from discriminating by sex, not the entire institution.

“We’re increasingly alarmed, “ Miles said, “about examples of discrimination in the California school system . . . specific ways that female students were excluded from program areas,” for example.

She cited a sexist joke contest conducted by a male teacher last Fall in his class. One of the jokes: “Why did God create woman? Because He can’t cook.” Miles is not amused. “If you substituted blacks and subjected young black children to this kind of blatant denegration of themselves and what they are,” she said, “they’d be up in arms.”

Miles, a former elementary school teacher, pointed to a drop in the number of young women in California schools participating in interscholastic sports since 1984. And she cited girls’ scoring on the average 62 points lower on SAT scores as evidence of the “bias” in school attitudes toward girls as well as their “be a nurse, not a doctor” conditioning.

In Palo Alto, she said, there was a gender-separated English composition class justified on the basis that “boys and girls can be more honest in their feeling if they’re separated.” Until the policy was discontinued in January, she noted, there were also separate topics for boys and girls.

Another of California NOW’s issues is child care. The organization has just completed a statewide assessment of needs by area and will produce an advocacy kit with data and suggestions in a few months. In many areas of the state there is “an abyssmal lack of access to affordable quality child care,” said Miles. NOW is exploring onsite child care as part of an employer’s flexible benefits plan.

Not since World War II, when child care was provided in the workplace, has this issue really been addressed, she said. “It’s very interesting that our society has chosen to view women as an expendable part of the workforce.” Another issue is adult care, a problem commonly faced by women in the “sandwich generation” who are trying to hold down full-time jobs and care for elderly parents.

Reproductive rights is a “front burner” issue, she added, and NOW and other pro-choice organizations will be fighting in Sacramento to retain access to abortions for poor women.

On the national level, Smeal cites issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment, pay equity, the family medical leave act and health care.

“It never is a high enough priority,” she said, even with Democrats who support these issues. “And now you have an awful lot of Democrats saying they’re for a strong defense. That’s a code word. Strong defense means you’re not going to cut the military budget. Well, for every billion dollars of defense spending, women lose 9,500 jobs (and men lose 500). When you knock down health care, you knock down women’s jobs. Defense spending is entirely mechanized, it’s not labor-intensive.”

As a party, the Democrats support women’s issues, she said, but “I think they stll see the job economy as men needing jobs and women’s jobs as incidental. But women my age (48) and younger are not thinking in terms of not working. It’s not just a peculiar feminist core. It’s women.”

The Democrats cannot win the Presidency in 1988, Smeal said, “unless they embrace change, embrace blacks, embrace women, embrace the future direction.”

At other levels, Smeal said, “Our first job is to convince feminists to run. Even if they lose, they’re going to help change direction.” Historically, fund-raising has been a problem for women candidates but, Smeal said, “the money is there if you ignite excitement.” (One source is now PACs).

If feminists “play it coy” and “target carefully,” Smeal observed, “it will take 400 years to get the changes. The bottom line is, we might make fools of ourselves, then again, it might just work. And at least it’s honest. What do we have to lose?”

She frets that NOW, as it has gained power, has been willing to take fewer risks, to appear undignified. Smeal believes it’s time to stop worrying about what people think. “The first people to criticize us these days,” she observed, are women who have attained positions of power and don’t want NOW stirring things up.

If NOW is suing an industry it has charged with inequality, for example, she said, inevitably that industry will field a woman attorney to do battle--”a strategy to put us in our place.”

Smeal brought with her to San Francisco a message about expanding the base of the feminist movement--”I want us to take global stands. We’ll never get women in leadership positions if we stay in the one sphere that’s been given to us.”