Women Politicians of the '70s: Reaping the Benefits of the Feminist Movement

By Ashley Hammarth

Senior Editor

t was the decade of the 1970s that provided women with their first real opportunities to win prominent electoral office. Some women who took this opportunity saw their election to office as a step forward for all women, and aligned themselves closely with the feminist movement; many, such as Dianne Feinstein and Jane Byrne, saw victory almost entirely in terms of their own self-achievement, and kept their distance from feminism. Feinstein and Byrne, close in age and disposition but divergent in politics, were both elected to mayoral office in 1979, in the cities of San Francisco and Chicago respectively. Their careers are reflective of many trends occurring among women politicians of the 1970s, such as their decisions not to be explicitly feminist and their decisions to try and portray themselves as political outsiders.

Though Feinstein and Byrne's careers have some important similarities, there are important differences as well. Feinstein built her career on running for elected office, while Byrne was a beneficiary of the legendary Daley Machine, which gave her her first patronage job in 1964. Perhaps most importantly, Feinstein, who has had a very successful political career in the years following her terms as mayor, is often seen as an important feminist politician. Jane Byrne, on the other hand, is rarely described in gender terms, except in passing, largely because she has never associated herself with the feminist movement. However, Feinstein was only tenuously associated with feminism in 1979, and secondly, Jane Byrne, despite her disassociation from it politics, did significantly benefit from the feminist movement.

Forty years after the 1920 attainment of women's suffrage, there were few political groups whose agendas included a strong focus on women's rights and there was nothing to indicate that American women were a discernible group with specific political interests. Men and women voted along similar lines, and therefore political scientists assumed that "the interests of men and women in the electorate were identical."(1) Although women made significant gains in the work force during the World War II era, proving themselves to be adequate workers, there was never any attempt to secure their accomplishments with national legislation.

Moreover, between the 1920s and the 1960s, feminists battled themselves over the merits of an Equal Rights Amendment, while other politically inclined women involved themselves in the Prohibition movement, the World War II effort, and the civil rights struggle, in effect preventing a strong feminist movement from coalescing. The combination of all these factors meant that there were very few women who held political office after suffrage. The vast majority of women who were elected were widows of politicians; they were not women who sought office in their own right.

In post-war America, Jane Byrne and Dianne Feinstein were leading similar lives, rearing children as stigmatized single mothers. Though neither was aware of it, they were living in the midst of a quiet but important trend. Shortly after many women lost their World War II era jobs to returning male veterans, white middle-class women began entering the work force and entering tertiary education in steadily climbing numbers, taking advantage of the robust economy. Although these women were likely to have three or more children during this "baby boom" era, they were completing their childbearing at young ages.

Altogether, there were fewer domestic claims on these women than there had been on their mothers. The entrance of white middle-class women into the work force created the "preconditions for a profound challenge to the traditional distribution of labor, rights, and privileges according to gender."(2) By 1960, 35% of all women were employed, accounting for one third of the labor force, and thus the issues of sex discrimination slowly entered the American consciousness.

Meanwhile, grass-roots efforts such as the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the Chicano Unionist movement were drawing together other disenfranchised people, and this would culminate in a sea of changes for American culture. Many important feminist politicians of the 1970s such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Bella Abzug, and Virginia Muzquiez, were originally involved in these other movements. Dianne Feinstein and Jane Byrne were never associated with any movement, and thus this may help to explain their reticence to associate with feminism-- they clearly were not interested in progressive politics.

In the early 1960s, for the first time since women's suffrage, women became the focus of national attention. In 1962 President Kennedy organized the President's Commission on the Status of Women, an in depth study of American women at all levels. The following year the Equal Pay Act, an outgrowth of the PCSW, was passed, granting women who work in the same jobs as men the right to be paid as much as their male counterparts. Also in 1963, Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique was released, and for the first time the discontent of white middle-class women with their domestic roles was publicly articulated. The book became a best seller, leading some women to consider for the first time that they deserved better life choices, legal and social equality with men, and a voice in society.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed; title VII of this historic piece of legislation, which reinforced the rights of black Americans, made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sex as well as race. Another important feminist development was the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, the first and most influential American women's organization.

Whatever their ambitions or political orientation, the women who decided to enter politics in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Dianne Feinstein and Jane Byrne, were making important personal decisions to deviate from the gender role that women are socialized into. The traditional conception of a woman's place in society not only positions her in the home, but socializes her to wait to be asked to be involved in activities, rather than to take the initiative herself. As Ruth Mandel describes in her book In the Running, the woman entering politics "asks overtly for a new kind of approval-- not for good looks or domestic talents, but for good leadership and skills... Rather than keeping order behind the scenes, she takes to the podium to deliver public speeches. She risks rejection and defeat openly."(3)

Yet, despite her rejection of traditional societal roles, the woman who sought political office in the 1970s was rarely a self-proclaimed feminist. Though she usually was not inspired to enter politics because of the feminist movement, she did have a feminist sensibility, contributed to by cultural events like The Feminine Mystique and NOW agitation, that made her declare it her turn to be in the spotlight. Yet as Mandel notes, "she may not even recognize that it was in fact the feminist concern with rigid sex-role stereotyping and the call for wider opportunities for women that focused her attention on the issue of whose turn it was."(4)

It is easy to recognize both Dianne Feinstein of the 1970s and Jane Byrne in the above quote. Today, Feinstein identifies herself with the 1992 and the "Year of the Woman" openly calling herself a feminist. In her 1992 autobiography Byrne claims she was raised by parents who "felt strongly about equal rights, even feminism."(5) Yet neither woman felt comfortable associating herself with the movement in the 1970s. But by no means were they the only two women politicians uncomfortable with feminism at that time. According to Susan Carroll's 1976 nationwide survey of 1,212 female candidates, women's issues played a fairly minor role in the campaigns of women in 1976:

"More than 20% of the candidates for state legislatures did not discuss women's issues at all, and only 10% initiated discussions on those subjects. That reticence undoubtedly reflected strategic considerations more than it did their interest in public policies concerning women, for these candidates held overwhelmingly positive attitudes towards the women's movement and women's issues."(6)

An important factor to consider, which Carroll does not address in her study, is the age of the candidates who responded to her extensive questionnaire. Dianne Feinstein and Jane Byrne were both in their early forties in 1976, and had spent most of their adult lives in the pre-feminist era. Certainly women politicians who are a similar age in 1996 are more likely to be comfortable with basic elements of feminism than their predecessors, simply because they have spent all of their adult lives exposed to those ideas. It makes sense that in 1996 identification with feminism is more prevalent among women politicians than it was twenty years ago.

Another compelling aspect of Carroll's study is that the "overwhelming proportions" of the women in her study were categorized as "psychologically androgynous," according to the Bem Sex Role Inventory analysis of their questionnaires. Psychological androgyny means that a person identifies neither with the masculine sex role nor the feminine sex role when describing him or herself in terms of personality characteristics. Therefore, it perhaps came more naturally for women politicians such as Feinstein and Byrne to break the traditional conceptions of womanhood that they had grown up with, without embracing feminism.

In the 1970s American culture, still recovering from the tumultuous 1960s and still absorbing the demands of the feminist movement, was confronted with the growing catastrophe of Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, two events which had a profound effect on people's trust in government.

"The specter of Watergate shrouded the country in a political era which had been marked increasingly by investigations of corruption among public officials at all levels. Renewed distrust of politicians and popular cynicism about politics-as-usual created a receptive atmosphere for new types of political candidates to emerge..."(7)

Women were one of the largest groups of "new types of political candidates" to benefit from this atmosphere. They were often perceived as "outsiders to the political process and thus as uncorrupted by it. Voters thought to view women as more honest, more trustworthy, and more moral than their male counterparts." (8) Feinstein and Byrne both attempted to use the negative American attitude towards political "insiders," to their advantage in their mayoral campaigns, despite the fact that neither of them were political outsiders in any real sense of the word. Nationally, women trying to bypass the traditional centers of political power in order to win office usually chose to take their campaigns directly to the electorate, rather than trying to access the oft-closed doors of party machines, labor union groups, business interests, and powerful special interest groups.

One of the things that especially distinguishes Jane Byrne and Dianne Feinstein from other women candidates of the 1970s is that they were both candidates for offices that require a sizable amount of money to be elected to. The necessity of having a large amount of money to run a campaign deterred many women from challenging high level incumbents, since women had limited access to large donors. It is important to recognize that even in the 1970s, when women were making more political gains than ever before, that in the United States campaigns on the whole men ran in virtually every contest that required large fund raising capabilities. Very few women competed in these races, meaning that most of the gains women did make were on the local level and sometimes state level.

Feinstein was able to enter the 1971 and 1975 mayoral races because she came from a wealthy family and was married to a renowned surgeon. Byrne was a true anomaly because she won her race, despite her very low budget campaign. Mayoral campaigns were increasingly expensive in the 1970s. In 1971 combined expenditures for the San Francisco mayoral campaign reached $1,000,000 for the first time; Feinstein spent approximately $150,000, compared to incumbent Mayor Joseph Alioto who spent $400,000. In 1975 Feinstein had a $100 per plate fund-raising dinner-- that alone netted about $50,000 for her campaign.

After NOW was founded in 1966, other feminist organizations followed: the National Women's Political Caucus (established in 1971) and the Women's Campaign Fund (established in 1973. However, all of the feminist groups were severely handicapped when it came to financially supporting feminist candidates. The maximum gift they were ever capable of giving any one candidate was $5,000 whereas male candidates often received gifts ranging from $50,000 to $500,000 from entrenched business interests and employee groups.

The cultural currency the feminist organizations had should not be underestimated however: raising public consciousness, changing popular attitudes towards women politicians, and increasing the aspirations of women politicians were no mean achievements. Indeed, in the 1970s their work was cut out for them. In 1976 only 76% of Americans said they would vote for a woman candidate for president, and in 1975 only 82% said they would vote for a woman mayor. For women candidates to succeed they needed not only money, but the sheer number of potential supporters in the electorate comfortable with the idea of a woman as a democratic representative.

There is little evidence to illustrate that women's organizations actively tried to

identify and encourage potentially strong women candidates to run for office in the 1970s. Only a handful of candidates in Susan Carroll's study claimed "that they had received important encouragement from representatives of the National Women's Political Caucus or other feminist groups." (9) An additional problem facing women candidates in the 1970s, which still arises today, was that feminist organizations sometimes had difficulty deciding whether to endorse a woman challenger or the "good" male candidate/incumbent who had fought consistently for women's interests. Dianne Feinstein felt the effects of this dilemma in her 1975 challenge to George Moscone, who was a popular progressive politician that was more outspoken on women's issues than Feinstein was.

Furthermore, some argue that attention paid to the Equal Rights Amendment drained feminist organizations' ability to support candidates and funnel money to their campaigns. Lastly, there was anti-feminist backlash in the 1970s, whose most prominent figure was Phyllis Schlafly, a person often credited with stopping the ratification of the ERA. Male candidates benefited from the presence of Schlafly and other women who discredited the feminist movement in the public's mind, since they ended up doing the work of the patriarchal males for them.

Unlike Jane Byrne and Dianne Feinstein, there were women politicians in the decade of the seventies who were explicitly feminist and who saw their political victories as a step forward for all women, rather than just themselves. However, Patricia Schroeder, Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm stick in our collective memory because they were the vocal exceptions. As Susan Carroll's study illustrates, most women involved in politics at the time were not feminist crusaders. In fact, even Geraldine Ferraro, who became a feminist icon in 1984 when she was the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, "did not consider herself a feminist" when she ran for Congress only six years earlier, in 1978.(10)

Overall, women politicians in the 1970s were not feminist. Their position as women gave them status as "outsiders" to traditional male politics, and some women exploited this advantage, and Jane Byrne and Dianne Feinstein are exemplary of that. Though it is important to recognize that Byrne and Feinstein were benefiting from the feminist movement while rarely if ever identifying as feminists, it is just as important to make clear that they should not be condemned for this; instead, it should be realized that their careers merely reflect larger trends in the society around them.

(1) Susan J. Carroll, Women As Candidates in American Politics (Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press, second edition, 1994), p.3.

(2) Susan M. Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics Since 1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p.22.

(3) Ruth B. Mandel, In the Running: The New Woman Candidate (New Haven, CT: Ticknor & Fields, 1981), p.6.

(4) Ibid, p.13.

(5) Jane Byrne, My Chicago (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), p.78.

(6) Susan M. Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics Since 1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p.22. From Carroll's first edition (1982).

(7) Ruth B. Mandel, In the Running: The New Woman Candidate (New Haven, CT: Ticknor & Fields, 1981), p.12.

(8) Susan J. Carroll, Women As Candidates in American Politics (Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press, second edition, 1994), p.26.

(9) Ibid, p. 45.

(10) Susan M. Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics Since 1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p.95.