“She is seen correctly as paving the way for my political career and those of many other women. “Gerry and I are often linked together,” Secretary of State and future presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton said at Ferraro’s funeral. Today, Ferraro, who died in 2011 at the age of 75, is remembered less for the elections she lost, and more for the elections that her 1984 vice presidential candidacy helped other women win. She also made unsuccessful bids for the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. 19, 1984, issue that Ferraro “appears to have hurt Mondale at the polls more than she helped him.” A woman in Memphis told TIME, “I’m a liberated woman, but I don’t think a woman should be running things in Washington.”Īfter the election, Ferraro returned to practicing law, accepted a fellowship at Harvard, wrote books and served as U.S. Catholics, women and Italian Americans voted for him over Mondale by large margins, leaving TIME to conclude in the Nov. In the end, America re-elected President Reagan in a landslide. When she wasn’t handling child abuse, rape and domestic violence cases, she was involved in local Democratic politics and talking to voters. After graduation, however, she found that Wall Street law firms were still resistant to hiring women, and she became a stay-at-home parent-until her cousin, who was Queens District Attorney, hired her as a prosecutor. After college, Ferraro taught second grade in the 1950s, but got bored and started attending Fordham Law School at night. Her father died when she was young, and her mother, a seamstress, raised the family in the South Bronx. 26, 1935, (now known as Women’s Equality Day) in the middle of the Great Depression. “That secretary may not want to be President of the U.S., but she may want to be president of her company.”įerraro was born in Newburgh, N.Y., on Aug. “Any time a woman reaches a revered status, it is easier for the secretary in an office to have a better sense of her self-worth,” said Faye Wattleton, President of Planned Parenthood. The high-pitched hopefulness coursed through every social realm, not just that of national politics. “A fifth-grade boy,” she says, “also has a view of a woman as being in a kind of role. Carol Nadelson, the Incoming President of the American Psychiatric Association, pointed out, male children will learn the new rules too. Win or lose in November, Geraldine Ferraro is now emblematic of the truest, purest facet of the American dream: that every citizen is entitled to an equal chance…Īs Dr. With one swift stroke, however, the Democrats have made it possible for women to enter the final phase of their enfranchisement. Even with universal suffrage, American women had enjoyed, until last Thursday, nothing more than the right to elect a man to the White House. However she votes, her thoughts about her place in the world will not be the same again…įeminism has scored no more spectacular triumph since women won the right to vote.
Another woman’s name will be on the ballot before her. Come November, a woman from Tulsa (Hartford, Butte) will hear the curtain of the voting booth shut behind her, and she will be alone with America and her own life. One tends to think of history making in terms of treaties, crownings, facts, but it’s the mind that makes the changes.
The magazine further described the significance of the choice back then in that issue: Speaking more broadly about the broader significance of her candidacy on society, she said, “If a woman can be Vice President of the U.S., what job is there that a woman cannot do?” “This is a first, and it’s bound to create concerns but we are going to put those concerns to rest quickly.” “We always have anxieties until we do it the first time, and then we usually recognize that those anxieties are baseless,” she said, responding to polls indicating resistance to a female vice presidential candidate among Southern white men.
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