Garaldine Ferraro was the
first woman to be nominated as a vice presidential candidate. She ran with Walter F. Mondale
in 1984 against Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.
The article I’m posting
about her is a New York Times Obituary written by Douglas Martin in 2011, the
year that she died.
Before being nominated she was first a public school teacher in
Queens, enrolled in the night program at Fordham Law School where she was one
of two women in the class. For thirteen years she practiced law in Queens doing
some work for her husband's business and for the Family Court. She was elected
president of the Queens County Women's Bar Association. Three years she later
was elected Queens district attorney. She then got a job as an assistant
district attorney and led a special victims unit specializing in rape, crimes
against the elderly, and domestic abuse. She was elected to congress in 1978
and moved up from there to become secretary of the Democratic caucus, and
finally chairwoman of the 1984 Democratic Platform Committee.
As the article points out, it was sixty-four years after
women gained suffrage. It wasn’t until another twenty-four years later that the
next woman, Sarah Palin, would be nominated for vice president. I think of the
impact Sarah Palin had on not only young girls but also society as a whole
(albeit mostly negative in my opinion) when she was nominated today and wonder
if I had been alive at the time, would the effect have been the same, possibly
even greater? How is it that I had never read about Geraldine Ferraro in
school? Will we still talk about Sarah Palin twenty years from now or will she
be largely forgotten like Ms. Ferraro?
Another interesting detail that this article only touches on
is the influence that the National Organization for Women had on her nomination.
Martin writes that NOW “threatened a convention floor fight” if the Democratic Party
did not nominate a woman. This, to me, echoes the importance of channels
outside of the political sphere that women have always used and relied on to
gain political leverage. It’s fascinating to me that even in 1984, almost 65
years after the ERA was first proposed and when women were struggling with the
decision to enter the political sphere or continue to work outside of it, we were
still having to pressure political parties from the outside to even allow us into the political sphere.
Ms. Ferraro also wrote a book called “Framing a Life: A
Family Memoir” if anyone is interested in reading more about her.
The article can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/politics/27geraldine-ferraro.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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