Madam President

The idea of a woman President has, until recently, always had the humor of improbability. When she was asked in 1952 what she would do if she were one day to wake up in the White House, Maine's Senator Margaret Chase Smith replied: "I'd go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I'd go home." Hollywood thought the idea was cute. In 1964's Kisses for My President, Politician Polly Bergen is elected and then, domestically enough, has to resign when her husband, Fred MacMurray, gets her pregnant. Yuk yuk yuk.

Eleanor Roosevelt considered the question in 1934 and concluded: "I do not think we have yet reached the point where the majority of our people would feel satisfied to follow the leadership and trust the judgment of a woman as President." Have enough voters reached that point today? Probably not. They don't seem ready for a woman Vice President either. A Field poll last week showed that Californians would be more reluctant to vote for a national ticket that had a woman candidate for Vice President than one with a black man in the No. 2 spot. But they may be getting there. Although she stands no chance of election this year, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, in a sort of double play, is seriously raising the possibility of a President who is not only a woman but a black as well. There will be eight presidential elections between now and the end of the century; the only surprise would be if there were not a woman running for President--or at least Vice President--on a major ticket well before the year 2000.

Given that likelihood, what sort of woman would stand the best chance of getting nominated? The professional requirements would probably be abnormally rigorous for the first woman hopeful, in order to overcome deep laminations of prejudice by female as well as male voters. Doubtless the ideal woman candidate would have held a number of previous public offices, so that her identity in jobs of responsibility and power would be fixed in the public mind. As with Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, her persona would be politically rather than sexually defined.

Ideally, voters would want the same qualities in a woman as in a man--ability, courage, experience, integrity, intelligence. But with a woman candidate, voter psychology, always unpredictable, would be especially complex.

Should she be married? Would it make any difference? And what would the husband's role be as First Gentleman? Would male voters make uncomfortable jokes about who would be wearing the pants in the White House? Milquetoast or Machiavelli? When Alabamians elected the late Lurleen Wallace Governor in 1966, they knew they were actually voting for George. Presumably Americans would know their candidates so well that they would not elect a woman whose husband would be the power behind the throne. Of course, there could be no double standard in the White House: axiomatically, Calpurnia's husband must be above reproach.

If a woman were the candidate, she would probably, like most male candidates, be in her 40s or 50s. Her children would already be at least adolescents, thus sparing the nation bulletins from a maternity hospital ("The President and baby are doing well") and jokes about the latest White House formula or diaper pins. It might well be that a cigar-smoking, oddsmaking computer would opt for a widow as the ideal candidate, since that would remove the husband question yet endow her with a patina of nonthreatening domestic respectability. Throw in a couple of grown children, the computer might add, and let the word out that she loves to cook--on occasion.

Jealousy. What should she look like? What if she were, say, as sexy as John Lindsay, or if, like some male politicians, she trailed a reputation for promiscuity? Mature good looks might help, as with a man. But obviously, as Michigan's Congresswoman Martha Griffiths notes, "you couldn't elect a woman just because she's stunning looking. It is some help, in fact, to a woman politician not to look too attractive. One of the things she cannot arouse is jealousy among other women." And it seems likely that a rumor of philandering would damage a woman far more than it would a man.

Some have argued a bit extravagantly in the past that a woman President would bring the millennium: her explicitly feminine qualities would gentle the militaristic impulse, introduce new compassion to such fields as health care, housing and education, and render government deeply humane. But many theoreticians of Women's Liberation think that that argument carries a sexist seed. Says Gloria Steinem: "The truth probably is that women are not more moral, they are only uncorrupted by power."

The canard about feminine instability would be the greatest handicap. Surgeon Edgar Berman earned a low place in the bestiary of Women's Liberation two years ago when he suggested that because of their hormonal chemistry women might be too emotional for positions of power. Yet despite that reputation--or because of it--women in politics have proved just as stable and sometimes as steely as any man. After all, Edmund Muskie wept publicly during the New Hampshire primary campaign last month. It was Richard Nixon, not his wife Pat, who broke down after he was defeated in the California gubernatorial election in 1962 and said he would not be kicked around any more.

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