TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111692/11169912.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 61

ELECTION `92

What Do Women Have to Celebrate?


Men still occupy nearly all the Senate seats, but women are
a more powerful political force than ever before

By BARBARA EHRENREICH -- With reporting by Wendy Cole/New York
and Julie Johnson/Washington


    Maybe plumbing, not biology, is destiny. More than 70
years after women won the vote, the U.S. Senate chamber still
has no women's bathroom. Even the Democratic cloakroom in the
House has no ladies' room, leaving female Representatives with
a hike to the Congressional Women's Reading Room, where there
are all of three toilets. Future archaeologists, studying the
pipes and bathroom fixtures of Capitol Hill, may conclude that
late-20th century America was a fortress of patriarchy on a par
with Saudi Arabia.

    They would have it wrong, of course. Measured in terms of
the number of feminist organizations, journals, support groups
and T-shirts per capita, the U.S. is the world headquarters of
the international feminist conspiracy. The paradox is that all
this grass-roots energy and commitment has never translated
into hard political power: in 1992, the Year of the Woman, 3%
of the Senate and 6% of the House of Representatives is female,
proportions that lag embarrassingly behind most European
nations.

    Which is why the fuss over the Year of the Woman has
always sounded a little menacing -- a way of saying "This is
your chance, gals. Now or never."

    But 1992 will deserve a place in "herstory" as the year
women stormed the Hill. One hundred and seventeen women ran for
seats in the House and Senate, far ahead of the previous record
-- 77 in 1990. In another first, 21 of the female challengers
were women of color, up from 14 in 1990.

    The Year of the Woman must have come as a surprise to the
many who have written feminism's obituary over the years. In
the 1980s feminism was supposed to have been supplanted by
mild-mannered, skirt-suited "postfeminists" who wanted nothing
more than a reliable baby-sitter and a chance to bang their head
against the corporate glass ceiling.

    But sometime in the past 12 months, a generation of women
woke up to the possibility that what they had taken for granted
could also be taken away. As the Supreme Court began to nibble
at Roe v. Wade, "choice" took on the moral urgency that in
another generation had been reserved for Vietnam. And then came
"Hill-Thomas." The visual that lingers shows 14 white men
confronting a species of human being that they would normally
encounter only in the form of a hotel maid. Little clicks of
raised consciousness could be heard throughout the land as women
plotted to integrate the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    So it was goodbye, postfeminism; hello, third wave. (The
first wave was the suffrage movement, and the second wave began
in the 1960s and '70s.) The other side of the neatly tailored
women running for office was a far larger number of women
running in the streets. In New York City feminists formed the
Women's Action Coalition, a militant, direct-action group
modeled on the boisterous gay group ACT UP. During the
Democratic Convention, while the female candidates preened and
paraded inside, thousands of women activists faced down pro-life
demonstrators at abortion clinics, rallied against violence
against women and published the sassy, hot-pink Getting It
Gazette.

    And there were achievements, as well as adrenaline, to
build on. Almost all the women candidates, including Patty
("just a mom in tennis shoes") Murray from Washington State, had
already served in a state legislature. What they needed for the
big leap was money, and this had been quietly building through
the '80s, as a generation of female fast-trackers made partner,
moved into corner offices and began to write their own checks.
After Hill-Thomas, they couldn't seem to write them fast
enough. The bipartisan National Women's Political Caucus raised
$61,000 from a single newspaper ad featuring a fantasy scene of
Clarence Thomas being grilled by a panel of female Senators.
Emily's List, the pro-choice Democratic women's donor network,
saw its contributions quadruple to an estimated $6 million,
making it the largest donor to congressional campaigns in the
country.

    Still, it might not have been the Year of the Woman if it
wasn't also the Year of the Vanishing Man. After a series of
scandals left Congress looking like a holding pen for unindicted
criminals, the men began to flee as fast as they could get their
resumes updated: 53 Representatives retired or just declined to
run again. Others, like New York's Stephen Solarz, found the
ground shifting beneath their feet as redistricting removed
their old constituencies. One way or another, an empty space
opened up, and that great sucking sound, as Ross Perot might
have put it, was women rushing in to fill the vacuum.

    Well, not every kind of woman. "It's the year of the
feminist woman," antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly observes tartly.
Or at least of the liberal Democratic woman, which is why George
Bush was heard to mutter, during the second debate, "I hope a
lot of them lose." Of the 11 women who ran for the Senate, 10
were Democrats, as were 70 of the 106 candidates for Congress.

    But where else was a candidate to go with her tote bag
full of women's issues if not to the Democratic Party? The
Republican Party has "family values," meaning opposition to
abortion and gay rights. The Democratic Party has "family
issues," meaning things like health care, education and family
leave. It probably helps that Clinton and Gore represent the
first generation of presidential candidates to have shared their
law school classes with women or their homes with actual
feminists. This puts them in a different geological era from
Bush, who, when questioned about appointing women to office,
mentioned the woman in his Administration who's responsible for
doling out souvenir tie clips, or Perot, who cited his wife and
"four beautiful daughters."

    And in 1992, the year of anti-incumbent fever, female
candidates had an appeal that went beyond gender loyalty. Where
women voters read "role model," males read "outsider." There was
a general expectation that women would be more ethical, less
taken by perks and pomp and more likely to view things from the
supermarket-counter level. This, in fact, had been the
suffragists' dream: that women would use their innate "mother
sense" to bring sweetness and light to the smoke-filled back
rooms.

    For one brief, defining moment in the middle of the
summer, the politics of the nation seemed to have become the
politics of gender. On the Republican side, there was a platform
borrowed from The Handmaid's Tale and Marilyn Quayle to
represent the vanishing female option of career wife. Quayle
made it clear just how much was at stake when she dragged in the
draft and the sexual revolution. This was all-out culture war,
baby boom-style: feminism vs. antifeminism, repression vs.
permission, mixing things up vs. shoring up the walls.
Armageddon with a female cast.

    Strangely, after all the buildup, the moment didn't last.
By September it began to look as though the Year of the Woman
would be only eight months long. With national attention focused
on the presidential candidates, politics resumed the ancient
rhythms of the horse race and the cockfight. Women's issues,
such as domestic violence, never came up in the presidential
campaign, and when abortion did intrude into the
vice-presidential debate, Admiral Stockdale undercut his own
pro-choice statement with a grumpy plea to "get on past this and
talk about something substantive."

    Meanwhile, women's campaigns began to sputter. Despite the
success of feminist fund raisers, most women still occupy an
economic class where a $100-a-plate luncheon counts as a new
blazer or a dental visit forgone. In Kansas, Democratic
challenger Gloria O'Dell raised barely $100,000 compared with
incumbent Bob Dole's $2 million. California's Barbara Boxer and
Pennsylvania's Lynn Yeakel found themselves too broke to counter
their opponents' attack ads until late in the campaign.

    Then there was the realization that women do not
necessarily inhabit a loftier moral plane than the men they
intend to dislodge. Illinois' Carol Moseley Braun got hit with
Medicaid-fraud charges for failing to report a windfall that
might have helped pay her mother's nursing-home bill. Yeakel was
revealed to have paid $17,000 in back taxes on the eve of
announcing her candidacy. Congresswoman Barbara Boxer had 143
bounced checks to account for. In the nastiest race of all, two
New York feminists, Geraldine Ferraro and Elizabeth Holtzman,
went down biting and clawing -- to make way for a liberal man.
And not all the new female candidates were even feminists:
G.O.P. challengers Charlene Haar (South Dakota) and Linda Bean
(Maine) proudly claimed to be "pro-life and pro-gun."

    Maybe that's how it should be: pit-bull women, right-wing
women, feminist women -- all kinds of women in all their
glorious diversity. Nothing in our genes, after all, says we
have to be kinder, gentler and more committed to family leave.
But with women's representation in national politics still
barely above presuffrage levels, it was only natural that most
of the new female candidates would define themselves as women
on a mission. Trailblazing is not a job for the uncommitted.

    The winners shouldn't expect to usher in the feminist
millennium. With a Clinton Administration, there may be some
easy wins on the Freedom of Choice Act, family leave and
fetal-tissue research. But in a rating of his program by the
Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, Clinton
received only a B-minus (Bush got a D), and in an effort to
build a governing coalition, he may be tempted to distance
himself from his party's more feminist and liberal wing. In the
House, where women have traditionally been relegated to
inconsequential committees, the new crop of freshwomen will be
starting at the bottom, struggling to get a word in edgewise.
And of course there will still be that long, long walk to the
ladies' room.

    As for the losers, plus all the women who felt they were
too poor, too inexperienced or too young to run this time:
nowhere is it written that 1994 need be the 218th Year of the
Man. Everything that the new female Senators and Congresswomen
manage to accomplish will add to the credibility of the next
surge of female candidates. And everything they don't get done
will only add to the anger, and hence to the feminist resources,
available to fuel the fire next time.