"Our Candidate/Ourselves"

By Jane O'Reilly

Ferraro touches women's lives in a way no politician ever has

Geraldine Ferraro's trail-blazing campaign has taken on meaning beyond politics for millions of American women. To get a sense of this somewhat hidden impact on private lives, TIME Contributor Jane O'Reilly met with women in Cleveland before and after the vice-presidential debate, and during a Ferraro campaign stop there last week. Her report:

There is a certain kind of glance women have always exchanged when something very important to them is being derided by the men in the family. Many of those sidelong looks have been exchanged since Geraldine Ferraro was nominated. Even female voters who do not support her as a candidate feel a bond with her as a woman. After the candidate spoke at a breakfast forum last week, three women from the fashionable eastern suburbs -- a part of Cleveland where shopping can be taken up as a way of life -- compared impressions. As voters they remained undecided. As women how do they respond to Ferraro? They give each other that glance. "We all have daughters . . . We feel a tremendous surge of pride."

Men and women feel differently about Ferraro. To men she is at worst a threat and at best a candidate. To women she is something like "our candidate/our selves." The evening before the debate, the women who ride the No. 55 bus home from work to the western suburbs had very clear visions of the worst things that could happen to Ferraro. "She could have a snit." "She could cry or giggle." "I'm afraid my husband might think she seems like his mother." A travel agent said, "I worry a lot about her feet. Where does she find comfort able shoes? That's not a problem men candidates have."

What those women were really talking about was the problem of being a woman in what is still a man's world. Every fear they have for Geraldine Ferraro -- What if she hesitates? What if she is dismissed as "just like a woman"? --is rooted in their own experience. It is empathy of the most profound sort, a conflicting mixture of pride and self-doubt.

Women, especially women seeking public office, have been allowed a very narrow range of acceptable behavior. A woman candidate must be neither too sexy nor too severe, too young nor too old. Her voice must be modulated into an aural approximation of the dress-for-success suit. Otherwise she will be thought -- God forbid -- too aggressive. She must seem tough enough to stand up to the Soviets without being tough enough to frighten Freud.

That psychic procrustean bed is being splintered by Ferraro's campaign. The next woman to run for Vice President will not need to achieve perfect self-modulation. Nor will a male candidate again take the liberty, as George Bush did, of making lame jokes about the World Series when given the chance to ask a question of his female opponent. Lee Csanad, a typographer, said indignantly, "Bush certainly underscored the fact that to this Administration our opinion has never mattered." The Bush campaign's post-debate donning of the manly trappings of the locker room--from gleeful references to kicking ass to an exchange of challenges about "manhood" with Mondale--was explained by Ohio Governor Richard Celeste as a reaction to anxiety. "That sort of defensive thing happens whenever women get close to power. Men just don't know how to handle it."

The Ferraro candidacy marks a changing of the old guard, a demarcation point in American politics and society. It is the result of years of still inconclusive evolution, and it generates emotions that are an inextricable blend of the domestic and the political. Along the Cuyahoga River, where the bare ruined choirs of America's industrial heartland are now being gingerly reclaimed by singles bars and furniture boutiques, Kathy Peterson, 33, is manager of an antique-brass shop. She spent a lot of time this fall trying to resolve her tumbled responses to Ferraro. Married, a mother and stepmother, she is "not a strong women's libber." She doesn't think people should vote for Ferraro just because she is a woman. Last week, after the candidate's visit, she said, "I've made up my mind. My husband said she didn't belong in the White House. I don't think that's fair. I would rather he said it's my choice. You know, men are going nuts over this."

St. Rose's Roman Catholic Church dominates a Cleveland working-class neighborhood of shingled two-family homes. On the Sunday before the debate, a sermon resisted change through severe warnings against the twin evils of abortion and recreational sex. "Think about it when you go to vote," admonished the priest. Parishioner Judy Tren-kamp, a photocopier operator, lives with her son in a mock-Tudor house next to the railroad tracks. "Half of this parish is out of work," she shrugs. "I wanted Ferraro to trounce Bush."

Further east, further down the economic scale, at the K mart on 65th Street, a woman in the check-out line flashes one of those sidelong looks that speak of revenge to be taken in the privacy of the voting booth. She says, "I'm from West Virginia. I find, in the family, it's the men who do most of the talking against having a woman Vice President. But hillbilly women stick together, you know what I mean? As my momma always said, 'The thread gets very thin, but don't ever give up.' " A Cleveland policeman guarding the desolate shopping area says, "Ferraro is one hell of a lady. I just wish we could have Reagan with her." A surprising number of people, men and women, talk about that as a good ticket, "combining the strongest candidates in a kind of symbolic resolution of deeply divisive issues.

Whenever Ferraro speaks, it is the feminist lines that win the biggest applause, as when she promises to be inaugurated for her second term under a Constitution that includes an Equal Rights Amendment, or when she answers the seemingly ubiquitous abortion protesters by saying that if she were raped and became pregnant, "that choice will have to be mine." Even men who admire her do not really understand what she means to women, the resonance when she repeats the line from her acceptance speech: "If we can do this, we can do anything." As Lee Csanad, watching her in Cleveland, said, "Her nomination is the first thing that has ever made me feel I was included in this country. And let me tell you something I hadn't even realized until today--her candidacy has already changed my life." --By Jane O'Reilly