The Women on the Hustings

THEY started off well enough. Led by Jeannette Rankin, a give-'em-hell Montana suffragette, women cracked the congressional sex barrier in 1916, four years before they won the right to vote. Since then, things have slowed down a bit. In the last half-century, only 75 women have been elect ed or appointed to seats on Capitol Hill.

In the current Congress, there are only eleven female members, as opposed to 19 nearly a decade ago. The problem, of course, was and is discrimination. All too often, the electorate still view women politicians as sideshow curiosities. The political doyens of both parties, who control campaign funds, have a disturbing tendency to disappear when a woman manages to capture a party nomination.

Volunteer Work. This year, despite the obstacles and for reasons as varied as the candidates themselves, women are returning to the political lists in force: nearly a score of women are campaigning for election to major offices this fall. Ten of the eleven incumbents are up for reelection. All seem to be shoo-ins, and at least two of the newcomers appear certain to carry their races as well.

Last week Lenore Romney, wife of HUD Chief George Romney, won a hotly contested Republican primary for U.S. Senator in Michigan.

Though not considered likely to defeat Democratic Incumbent Philip Hart, Mrs. Romney is by no means out of the race. Should she win she would become the fourth woman elected to a full six-year term in the Senate. She ran for public office because "this country is in a te rible mess in every area, and the times demand new leadership." After 21 years of volunteer service, she felt competent to provide that leadership. "Volunteer work is working with people. In a political context, is this unimportant?" she asks.

Apparently, many thought so. A slender, pretty woman of 61, Lenore had difficulty in persuading voters that she was skilled in politics or battle-tested in any significant arena.

Like her husband, Lenore Romney campaigns as a defender of the home, the family and the church, but without the specific suggestions for solving the problems of the decade. She favors equal work opportunity for women but does not believe that American womankind is in need of liberation. On Viet Nam, she shares the view that the U.S. should not have entered the war, but agrees that Nixon's pace of withdrawal is the best currently possible. Something stronger will likely be needed to best Hart, a popular liberal Democrat with widespread support throughout the state.

Among the other candidates:

> Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly, in her late forties and the author of A Choice Not an Echo, which sounded the theme for Barry Goldwater's disastrous 1964 campaign, is a Republican candidate for Congress in Illinois. A blunt conservative who advocates a military establishment beyond the wildest dreams of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, she also sees her role as that of a "congressional watchdog" over excessive govern mental expenditures.

> Mrs. Kathleen Williams, 50, a former editor of Glamour magazine, is a Democratic candidate for Congress in Indiana. Her prime interest is the impending crisis in medical care (too few doctors, nurses and beds). Exceptionally outspoken, she advocates dropping all abortion laws and shifting the emphasis on crime from penalties to rehabilitative centers for drug addicts and drunks. Her slogan: "Indiana needs a woman in the House."

> Louise Day Hicks, 47, a nearly successful candidate for mayor of Boston, is now running as a Democrat for the House. She wants to end the war and divert that money and funds from the space program to cities. She has been endorsed by the Boston locals of the International Longshoremen's Association as "man enough for us," a phrase that would anger many a Women's Lib militant, but pleases the hard-nosed Mrs. Hicks.

> Shirley Chisholm, 45, now the only black Congresswoman and a Democratic candidate for re-election in New York City, is a maverick who deserted her party's candidate in order to support John Lindsay and could have written the book on Women's Liberation. Tough, honest and a veteran of years of political in-fighting in New York City, she believes that discrimination against women is so severe that "we have not even reached the level of tokenism yet."

> Bella Abzug, 50, a national leader of Women Strike for Peace and an originator of the dump-Johnson movement, was involved in most of the critical issues of the '70s long before they became part of the national dialogue. A Democratic congressional candidate from New York City, she defeated longtime Incumbent Leonard Farbstein in the Democratic primary. She is against the war, strongly in favor of women's rights, and almost a certain winner in November.

> Myrlie B. Evers, 37, .the widow of murdered Civil Rights Leader Medgar Evers, is a Democrat who is "basically a peace candidate" for Congresswoman in California. Picked by local Democratic leaders to be a sacrifice candidate in a heavily Republican district, she ran well in an interim election held earlier this year to fill the seat of the deceased incumbent and is now in the November race to win, even though she is given small chance of succeeding. "I found people genuinely frightened." she says. "They didn't know what to expect from a woman, and especially from a black woman."

Clearly, the strength of the women on the 1970 hustings is their diversity.

Few generalizations apply. In the era of Women's Lib, they are for the most part notably unmilitant. As with their male counterparts, their views are dictated by the constituencies and by their individual beliefs as well as party loyalties. Other than Bella Abzug, who, one of her supporters warned, "will come to Washington and turn this town upside down," they fit most easily into the traditional patterns: liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat. But that comforting conformity to the System will be reversed, insists Shirley Chisholm. A woman President some day? "Of course," she snaps. "You can't stop it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.