WHO YOU KNOW VERSUS WHO YOU REPRESENT:
Feminist Influence in the Democratic and Republican Parties
by Jo Freeman

Shorter version published in The Women's Movements of the United States and Western Europe: Feminist Consciousness, Political Opportunity and Public Policy ed. by Mary Katzenstein and Carol Mueller, Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1987, pp. 215-44.

In the last few years feminism has become highly identified with the Democratic Party and anti-feminism with the Republican Party. This development is ironic for two reasons. When the contemporary women's movement emerged in the mid-sixties its founders had no desire to become closely identified with any political party; many of them viewed both parties as representatives of a status quo which they disdained, and the rest preferred bipartisan activity. The second irony is that the parties with which feminism and anti-feminism are currently identified are the opposite of their historical affiliations. In the last ten years feminism has not only become partisan in nature but the parties have switched sides.
This polarization occurred because the political culture of the Democratic Party is more receptive to the influence of organized interests than that of the Republican Party and it underwent some significant transformations which redefined the structure of available opportunities for action. The political culture of the latter gives greater weight to personal connections and the personal connections of Republican feminists have not been to the winners of intra-party political struggles.

"EQUALITY" vs. "PROTECTION": THE ORIGINAL FIGHT

The Woman Suffrage movement was not a united movement. It had two distinct branches with different strategies and different goals which were not abandoned even after suffrage was attained. The moderate branch was by far the largest and is given most of the credit for the Nineteenth Amendment. Its dominant organization was the National American Women's Suffrage Association which, under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, mobilized the ratification campaign through its state chapters. Even before final ratification Catt successfully urged her followers to disband the feminist organization and form a non-partisan, non-sectarian League of Women Voters (LWV) which would encourage women to work within the parties and would support a broad range of social reforms.
Under the banner of the National Women's Party (NWP), the militant feminists had used civil disobedience, colorful demonstrations and incessant lobbying to get the Nineteenth Amendment out of Congress. Once it was ratified, they decided to focus their attention on the eradication of legal discrimination against women through another Constitutional amendment.¹ Concentrated in Washington and funded more by legacies and wealthy benefactors than a large membership this strategy was suitable to the NWP's particular strengths as well as its feminist ideology. The Equal Rights Amendment, written by the NWP's guiding light Alice Paul, was strongly opposed by the LWV, the newly created Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, the National Women's Trade Union League, the National Consumer's Union and most other women's organizations. Their opposition was based on the one fact about the ERA on which everyone could agree; that it would abolish protective labor legislation for women.²
The NWP did not originally intend the ERA to abolish protective legislation. It was aimed primarily at the plethora of laws which restricted women's property rights, disadvantaged them under state family laws, or barred them from holding office or serving on juries. However, the overwhelming conclusion of legal authorities was that the amendment would nullify or throw open to question all legislation aimed at women. The NWP tried to work with the opposing women's organizations to draft suitable language exempting protective legislation, but agreement could not be reached on the wording. Therefore, the NWP changed direction. It admitted protective laws would be eliminated, but claimed that this would be desirable because such laws only limited women's opportunities.³
The ERA was introduced into Congress in 1923 by Sen. Charles Curtis (R. Kan). Over the next few decades each side devoted itself to undermining the position of the other with the result that each's efforts to improve women's lot canceled the other's. For example, in 1932, at the urging of Republican NWP members, President Hoover issued an executive order denying Federal agency heads the right to use sex as a job qualification. In 1934 the Women's Bureau persuaded President Roosevelt to reverse this decision by arguing that appointments of women to the civil service had declined as a result because male veterans got preference over women even for traditional female jobs.⁴

Peterson...and her colleagues used the presidential commission on women to stop the E.R.A. dead in its legislative tracks. Peterson reasoned that Congress would not be likely to act on the E.R.A. while the matter was under consideration by a presidential panel. In addition, she presumed that eventually the Commission would offer substitute recommendations which would continue to stymie the Amendment's progress. But obstructing the E.R.A. was not really her primary motive. Peterson regarded the Commission's most important function to be the creation of an alternative program of "constructive" action to improve women's status, a possibility which before had always been blocked by the E.R.A. dispute.¹⁷
Although the President's Commission gave Congress an excuse to abstain from further consideration of the ERA, it also was a key element in its resurgence. Its existence prompted governors in all but one state to create their own state commissions on the status of women, which in turn prepared extensive reports documenting discrimination against women in their states. The members of these commissions were invited to annual conferences in Washington by the Women's Bureau. It was at the third such conference in June 1966 that the National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed. Initially, NOW was primarily concerned with changing the guidelines on sex discrimination promulgated by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, which was created by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It soon expanded its scope.¹⁸
Legal action by women under Title VII led the courts to invalidate most protective labor legislation or order it extended to men. This neutralized traditional ERA opponents. Many switched sides. Several unions were impressed by the plethora of legal complaints filed by blue collar women about the restriction of their job opportunities by protective labor legislation. The United Auto Workers endorsed the ERA in 1970 and it was soon followed by the Communications Workers and the Teamsters. The AFL-CIO didn't change it's policy until late 1973. The Women's Bureau switched in 1969 when the Nixon Administration appointed as its Director Elizabeth Duncan Koontz. She was black, a former President of the National Education Association from North Carolina and, like the NEA, supported the ERA. She quietly lobbied union women who in turn lobbied union men.
In May of 1970 hearings were held in the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee (now chaired by an ERA supporter) as a result of disruptions by NOW members of February hearings on the 18-year-old-vote. The AFL still testified against the ERA, but no representatives of women's organizations did so. At the same time the White House released the report of the Task Force on Women's Rights and Responsibilities appointed by President Nixon. It recommended endorsement of the ERA. In June the new Secretary of Labor added his endorsement.
Between 1970 and 1972 opposition to the ERA was greatly attenuated and what there was was not partisan in nature. With a few notable exceptions, the ERA became a symbolic issue on which everyone could agree. Yet even as this agreement was reached a new opposition was developing. Ironically, it was from the right, which had mostly supported the ERA during its lengthy stay in Congress. This opposition grew and eventually consumed more moderate forces, even while the ERA gained support from ancient foes to the left. By 1976 party once again emerged as a major dividing line between opponents and supporters. But by now they had switched sides. The Democrats were virtually all in favor of the ERA, and the Republicans were the major source of opposition.¹⁹

REFORM, REVOLT AND REVOLUTION IN THE PARTIES

To understand what made this switch possible, one must first examine what was happening in the Democratic and Republican Parties during the sixties and early seventies. Briefly, the Democratic Party was going through a public and often tumultuous reform of its rules and its composition as a result of a grassroots insurgency, and the Republican Party was engaged in an undercover civil war between a more liberal Eastern elite which had controlled the party's Presidential nomination since 1940 and a conservative Western and Southern counter-elite.

The Republican Party

It has often been noted that the Democratic Party is open, loud and contentious while the Republican Party is closed, quiet and consensual.²⁰ That has not kept the Republican Party from waging internal war but it has kept many of its more bitter battles out of the public eye. Thus it is a little harder to trace the route by which anti-feminists captured the internal policy apparatus of the Republican Party. The Republican Party has had two definite wings for most of its history. When Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft split the Party in 1912 "the 'regulars' of the Taft Wing remained in control of the party machinery, and the citizen wing of progressive and intellectual Republicans was driven into homeless exile."²¹ However, this wing contains many of the richest families in the country, and for many years they financed the Republican Party. During the 1940s and 1950s, when the regulars were disorganized by defeat, the "Eastern Establishment" was able to impose its choice for Presidential nominee, giving the country Wendell Wilkie, Thomas E. Dewey and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Although Eisenhower was the Establishment's only successful nominee, he was not a party man. Party organization did not flourish. Eisenhower's opponent for the 1952 nomination, Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, son of William Howard, died in 1953, leaving the more conservative and provincial wing of the party without a leader. By 1958 the Party structure was skeletal and the Party's influence minimal. Only 14 governors and seven legislatures out of 48 were Republican.²² In 1960 Eisenhower's heir apparent, Richard Nixon, who won the nomination without serious opposition, lost the election to John F. Kennedy, who had won his nomination only after a ferocious primary battle that left the Democrats fragmented and scarred.
Into this vacuum stepped a small coterie of ideological conservatives. Their leaders were also Eastern and often intellectual, but not part of the Establishment. Their orientation was conservative and anti-government, but unlike the Taft conservatives they were not isolationists. Inspired by the anti-Communism of the 1950s they favored a strong defense and an interventionist foreign policy. They already controlled the Young Republicans, which is a much more important organization than the Young Democrats. On October 8, 1961, 22 conservatives met in Chicago and decided to organize a movement to draft Goldwater for President in 1964. Although Goldwater, an Eisenhower delegate at the 1952 Convention, ignored their efforts, the convener of that meeting, F. Clifton White, used the YR network to systematically select conservative Goldwater delegates to the 1964 Republican Convention. Since primaries were not at that time the means by which most delegates were selected, by the time Goldwater announced his candidacy, his nomination was virtually secured.²³
Although the overwhelming Goldwater loss in November appeared to be a disaster for the Republican Party, the Eastern Establishment was unable to take advantage of it to discredit the conservatives. The Establishment's power was at the top; it had no grass roots. And the top was not even unified. Consequently the 1964 election handed the Republican party over to a coalition of conservatives from the South, the Southwest and the West. It also raised the consciousness of conservative voters, created mailing lists on which future conservative campaigns and fundraising efforts could draw and brought Ronald Reagan to national attention, through a highly touted speech at the Convention.²⁴ Reagan made a half-hearted campaign for the nomination in 1968, but most conservatives had concluded that Nixon was acceptable and electable. By 1972, Nixon's policies had undermined his acceptability and the right was looking for a standard bearer. Ronald Reagan was ready and available -- for 1976.

The Democratic Party

Reform in the Democratic Party is usually traced to the traumatic 1968 Democratic Convention in which the Party confronted the fact that the voters had very little say in who would receive the Party's presidential nomination. At that convention Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated with 67 percent of the votes cast on the first ballot even though he had not become a candidate until April 27 and had largely avoided the primaries. Humphrey and President Lyndon Johnson, whose decision not to run for reelection made Humphrey's nomination possible, received seven percent of the overall vote in the fifteen states which had primaries that year.²⁵ Before the Convention ended the delegates voted to establish a Commission on Presidential Nomination and Party Structure. Although few of those voting for it realized it at the time, this Commission's proposals would forever change the way in which Democratic candidates for President were nominated.²⁶
This momentous development is rooted in the conflict between the Southern Democratic Party and civil rights supporters. For the first third of the twentieth century the South had a virtual veto over the Democratic nominee for President because convention rules required that the nominee receive two-thirds of all delegate votes. This rule was rescinded at the 1936 Convention, a harmonious gathering completely controlled by Franklin D. Roosevelt, which also saw the removal of the traditional "states rights" plank from the platform. In 1948, with Roosevelt gone, the South revolted. Several states threatened to walk out of the Convention when a civil rights plank was passed. Instead many disgruntled Southerners met after the Convention to form the Dixiecrat Party, which nominated South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond for President. Although many Southern Democrats shied away from this effort, Thurmond was the official Democratic Party nominee in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Louisiana. This led the Party to impose a loyalty pledge in 1952 which Southern delegates said they would comply with. In the 1956 and 1960 conventions a truce of sorts was reached with Southern delegations. The 1948 defection was not repeated, a formal pledge of loyalty was not required, and even stronger civil rights planks continued to be passed over Southern objections.²⁷

Tension erupted in 1964 and shifted from the platform to the credentials committee. The burgeoning civil rights movement had formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sent an integrated delegation to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the all-white regular delegation. After arm-twisting by President Johnson, the convention approved by voice vote a proposal to seat two MFDP members as delegates at large and the remainder as honored guests. Members of the regular delegation were allowed to keep their seats if they signed a pledge to back the national ticket. The compromise further provided that at future conventions state delegations must be selected by a nondiscriminatory process and a Special Equal Rights Committee was established to aid in this. The MFDP denounced this compromise as a sellout, but in 1968 their successors, the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi, were seated in place of the regular delegation and Georgia's votes were split between the white regular and integrated insurgent delegations. Credentials challenges in another 13 states were decided in favor of the regulars.²⁸
Although Humphrey lost the 1968 election by a small margin, as titular Party head he appointed as chair of the "reform commission" his colleague George McGovern, who had declared his own candidacy for the 1968 nomination after Robert Kennedy was assassinated but had campaigned for Humphrey as a loyal Democrat after he was nominated. McGovern in turn hired as the commission staff several youthful supporters of the insurgent candidates. They interpreted their mandate and their authority broadly. Traditionally, the state and local parties wrote their own rules and chose their own delegates to attend the quadrennial convention. The loyalty issue had created a precedent for the national party to exercise some authority over the state parties, but not to the extent soon to be proposed by the Commission. A series of hearings around the country exposed the often secret and arcane means by which delegates to the national nominating convention were chosen and controlled by local party officials.²⁹
Given the apparent rejection of the Democratic Party by the voters in 1968, this exposure undermined the legitimacy of the procedures used by the party's leaders to select their standard bearer. They were receptive to changes that would restore that legitimacy and bring the Party back into the White House -- changes that they would oppose once their real impact became clear. By the time it finished its work, the Commission had laid down guidelines the state parties were required to follow that would "open" the Presidential nomination to ordinary party members and gave the national party authority to veto state decisions not in compliance with the national rules.³⁰
Furthermore, the Party was to be representative. Guidelines A-1 and A-2 required that minorities, youth and women be represented in each state's delegation "in reasonable relationship to their presence in the population of the state." This provision was originally written to pacify blacks, who wanted more than a no discrimination rule. It was extended to youth, who had fueled the 1968 insurgent candidacies in protest against the war in Viet Nam, and presciently included women who were emerging as an insurgent group but had not yet demonstrated the political clout of either blacks or youth.³¹

CONTEMPORARY FEMINISM AND THE POLITICAL PROCESS

The new feminist movement which emerged in the 1960s was the spiritual but not the organizational descendent of the post-Suffrage feminists. Indeed the founders of the new organizations were barely aware of the personalities, the organizations and the issues -- particularly the ERA -- which had defined feminism for the previous forty years. Most of them thought feminism had died with the passage of the 19th Amendment. The contemporary movement had two origins from two different strata of society with different styles of political action. The dividing line between the two was the generation gap, much heralded in the sixties as separating the political values and styles of those born after World War II from those born before. I call one the older branch and the other the younger branch, both because the former began first and because its primary participants were older.
The founders of the older branch created its first formal organization at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women. The National Organization for Women initially conceived of itself as a national lobbying group of politically astute women whose primary focus was to be the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After the movement received massive publicity in 1970 it was overwhelmed by women from all walks of life seeking to join and, almost despite itself, developed a mass base. For the next few years NOW operated on two levels which were not well coordinated; at the national level it was a relatively weak and unstable organization trying to cope with the dilemmas of rapid expansion and program development while attempting, with only limited success, to be the major lobbying and litigation organization its founders had envisioned. At the local level NOW chapters were springing up everywhere and vigorously looking for ways to educate their members and focus their energies. After 1975 the national organization began to centralize and strengthen itself and the chapters began to decline.
The younger branch of the emerging movement began among those younger women who had been involved in the social movements of the early sixties -- student protests, civil rights and anti-War. They had become alienated by the male domination of these movements which espoused the goals of freedom, justice and equality while expecting women to devote their energies to servicing men. Partially in reaction to their experiences in these movements the participants of the younger branch rejected the possibility of forming a national organization, and were quite hostile to the idea of organization in general. But like the men from whose organizations they came, they had no interest in the major political parties, viewing them as merely handmaidens of an oppressive political system.

Democratic feminists had two credentials challenges that were of particular concern to them because of the striking lack of women on the state delegations: South Carolina and Chicago. McGovern supported both challenges, but finally told his delegates to vote against seating the insurgent South Carolina delegation to avoid a procedural problem. The women were incensed but were powerless to prevent South Carolina's regular delegation from being seated. They also clashed with McGovern's organization over the reproductive freedom plank, a weight the Democratic nominee didn't wish to carry into the Presidential campaign. After what was one of the most emotional floor debates of the Convention, pro-choice supporters lost the floor vote by three to two. The NWPC had also considered nominating a woman for Vice President, and when they saw that a last minute campaign organized by three Texas students for Francis "Sissy" Farenthold was attracting interest, (she had narrowly lost the Texas Gubernatorial primary) they decided to turn their energies in that direction. She came in second with 13 percent of the vote.³⁸
Although the Republican feminists achieved more of their tangible goals than did the Democrats, more Democratic delegates (25 percent) than Republicans (10 percent) thought the NWPC had a great deal of influence on the outcome of the convention.³⁹ This discrepancy was partially because the Democrats had already made more extensive changes in the rules than the Republicans were even proposing, but even more it was a consequence of the different styles of the two parties. Republicans favor quiet persuasion while the Democrats pursue public confrontations. Although the Republican feminists were Party activists, they sought as public spokespeople for their issues women with even more impeccable party credentials including elected officials and wives of prominent Republican men. While these women led the fights in the Committees, the NWPC activists lobbied quietly behind the scene. They eschewed publicity, and held only one delegate meeting, on the weekend between the Committee meetings and the convention itself. At this meeting prominent Republican women informed the delegates about what had happened. The Republican feminists planned nothing for the convention itself, but did hold a series of box lunches with delegates to discuss how to achieve more influence for women in the Republican Party. Although they had enough support on the Platform Committee to force a floor fight over abortion, they chose not to. Betsy Griffith, one of the NWPC organizers, explained why:

Because the women delegates were loyal Republican partisans before they were feminists, there was little enthusiasm for introducing an abortion plank on the Convention floor..., for nominating Ms. Heckler for Vice President, or even for inciting a "spontaneous" demonstration. These Republican women were, on the whole, a group of savvy politicians, who recognized that they were a 30% minority group, and were not about to risk losing any futile battles in a public rout.⁴⁰

The Democratic feminists also held a meeting of delegates before the Convention, and virtually every day thereafter. The meetings were not restricted to delegates and many non-delegates came. There was no real distinction between the actual leaders and the public spokespersons, and the leadership group included public officials, local party activists and prominent feminists. It did not include wives; nor did it have many women with the extensive Party credentials of the Republican spokespersons. The purpose of the meetings was to formulate strategy and organize women delegates into a floor operation. Discussion was often extensive, resulting in acceptance of the leadership's recommendations, but the delegates' other commitments limited their willingness to serve as floor whips. Nonetheless, a primitive floor organization was created sufficient to garner a credible number of votes for Farenthold. While McGovern made it a point to include women in many of his key convention advisory bodies, they were his women, not feminist representatives.⁴¹ Many of the feminists were also McGovern supporters. Consequently they were cross-pressured -- they found it hard to decide whether their long range goals would be best served by going along with McGovern or pursuing immediate feminist concerns. This conflict was also debated in the delegate meetings. Thus there was much more awareness both in the press and among those attending the convention of what feminists were doing than was true at the Republican Convention.

The 1976 Conventions

By the 1976 Conventions the stage had been set for major battles over women's issues by both Republicans and Democrats, but they were very different battles. In the Democratic Party feminists fought for power independently of other struggles going on within the Party. In the Republican Party feminists fought for the ERA as part of the contest between Reagan and Ford. In the Democratic Party, feminists lost their battle but won the war. Feminists in the Republican Party did the opposite.
Following the 1972 conventions, the NWPC decided to institutionalize its party activities into two Task Forces, based on the lists of potential supporters its convention efforts had generated. The Democrats were organized first, largely because the Party planned a mini-convention in 1974 to adopt a Party Charter. The Charter was one of the boldest innovations to come out of the furor of 1968. With its adoption, Democratic Party affairs would no longer be governed by a hodgepodge of tradition, convention decisions and National Committee rulings. Although many of the provisions in the proposed Charter were rather radical, the hottest issue at the 1974 mini-convention was affirmative action.

Notes

¹ J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973, p. 49.

² Protective labor legislation was a generic label for a host of state laws applicable to women only which restricted the number of hours they could work, the amount of weight they could lift, occasionally required special benefits such as rest periods, and sometimes prohibited their working in certain occupations entirely.

³ Lemons, p. 187.

⁴ Cynthia Ellen Harrison, Prelude to Feminism: Women's Organizations, the Federal Government and the Rise of the Women's Movement, 1942-1968 (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1982), pp. 242-5.

⁵ Lemons, pp. 199-200.

⁶ Harrison, p. 38.

⁷ Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 125-126.

⁸ Ware, p. 121, Harrison, p. 32-33, 70.

⁹ Harrison pp. 58-60.

¹⁰ Harrison, pp. 71-87.

¹¹ Harrison, p. 88.

¹² Harrison, p. 94-98.

¹³ She didn't assume her post until November, after the Senate vote. Harrison, p. 121.

¹⁴ Leila J. Rupp, "American Feminism in the Post War Period", in Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945-1960, (Columbus, Ohio State University Press), p. 30.

¹⁵ Bessie Margolin, "Equal Pay and Equal Employment Opportunities for Women," 19 New York University Conference of Labor 297 (1967). See also Morag MacLeod Simchak, "Equal Pay in the United States," 103 International Labour Review 6 (June 1971).

¹⁶ Harrison, p. 268.

¹⁷ Harrison, p. 378.

¹⁸ Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation, New York: Longman, 1975, Chapters 2 and 3.

¹⁹ Eleanor Smeal, President of NOW and a leader of the ERA ratification struggle during its last five years, calculated that 83 percent of Republican legislators in key unratified states voted against the ERA while only 45 percent of the Democrats did so. Why and How Women Will Elect the Next President, New York: Harper & Row, 1984, p. 78.

²⁰ William Crotty, Party Reform, New York: Longman, 1983, p. 206.

²¹ Theodore H. White, The Making of the President - 1960, New York: Atheneum, 1961, p. 60.

²² White, 1960, pp. 61-62.

²³ Theodore J. White, The Making of the President - 1964, New York: Atheneum 1965, pp. 91-95. F. Clifton White, Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement, written with William J. Gill, New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1967. The self-publication of Phyllis Schlafly's A Choice Not an Echo in the Spring of 1964, which sold over 3 million copies, is also given some credit for helping Goldwater get the nomination.

²⁴ William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right, New York: William Morrow, 1984, pp. 161-162.

²⁵ Crotty, p. 27.

²⁶ Theodore White, The Making of the President - 1972, New York: Atheneum, 1973, p. 20. Barry Shafer, The Quiet Revolution: Party Reform and the Shaping of Post Reform Politics, New York: Basic Books, 1984. Chapter 1.

²⁷ National Party Conventions 1831 - 1976, Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc. 1979, pp. 69-82.

²⁸ National Party Conventions 1831-1976, p. 109.

²⁹ White, 1972, pp. 20-26.

³⁰ Mandate for Reform: A Report of the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection to the Democratic National Committee, Washington D.C.: Democratic National Committee 1970.

³¹ Mandate, p. 40. For a description of how this language was added see White, 1972, p. 29-32. Austin Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction: Party Reform in America, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1975, p. 188-191. Shafer, p. 465.

³² Freeman, p. 161.

³³ Shafer, p. 468.

³⁴ National Party Conventions 1831 - 1976 p. 113. See Shafer, Chapter 17 for a detailed description of how the burden of proof was shifted through a re-interpretation of the Guidelines.

³⁵ DO Committee, The Delegate Selection Procedures for the Republican Party II: Progress Report (of the) DO Committee, Washington, D.C.: Republican National Committee, July 23, 1971.

³⁶ Jeane Kirkpatrick, The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National Politics, New York: The Russell Sage Foundation and the Twentieth Century Fund, 1976, p. 429-447. Kirkpatrick's conclusions were based on an extensive questionnaire study of delegates to the 1972 Conventions. Unfortunately, her study didn't include a question on the ERA, probably because it wasn't very controversial in 1972.

³⁷ Information in this section is based on interviews with Doris Meissner on November 7, 1984, Pat Bailey on December 12, 1984 and an unpublished paper by Betsy Griffith that was probably written in late 1972. Bailey and Griffith were among those who orchestrated the NWPC efforts.

³⁸ White, 1972, pp. 172-174. Denis G. Sullivan et. al. The Politics of Representation: The Democratic Convention of 1972, New York: St. Martin's Press, pp. 53, 54, 69 n. 11. Susan and Martin Tolchin, CLOUT: Womenpower and Politics, New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1974, pp. 40-53. Kirkpatrick, pp. 448-9. Interview with Farenthold on July 18, 1984.

³⁹ Kirkpatrick, p. 446.

⁴⁰ Griffith, unpublished paper, p. 14.

⁴¹ White, 1972, p. 196. Tolchin, pp. 35-37.

⁴² Commission on Delegate Selection and Party Structure, Democrats All, Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1973, Rule 18. See Crotty, pp. 66-73, for a discussion of this Commission and its Rules.

⁴³ Denis G. Sullivan, et. al., Explorations in Convention Decision Making: The Democratic Party in the 1970s, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman Co., 1976, pp. 33-34, 44, 62-64, 72-73, 78.

⁴⁴ Freeman, pp. 220-221. Susan E. Marshall, "Keep us on the Pedestal: Women Against Feminism in Twentieth-Century America" in Jo Freeman, ed. Women: A Feminist Perspective, 3rd. ed., Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1984, p. 569. Nancy E. McGlen and Karen O'Connor, Women's Rights, New York: Praeger, 1983, p. 373-4. David W. Brady and Kent L. Tedin, "Ladies in Pink: Religion and Political Ideology in the Anti-ERA Movement," Social Science Quarterly 56 (March 1976): 564-575. For an analysis of why the ERA failed to be ratified see Gilbert Y. Steiner, Constitutional Inequality: The Political Fortunes of the Equal Rights Amendment, Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1985.

⁴⁵ Information in this section is based on observations and interviews I made at the 1976 Republican Convention in Kansas City, and the Democratic Convention in New York. Some of this appeared in Ms. magazine, October 1976, pp. 74-76, 113-115 and November 1976, pp. 19-20.

⁴⁶ Information in this section is based on interviews and observations I made at the Conventions of the Republican Party in Detroit and the Democratic Party in New York. Much of it was published in In These Times, July 30 - August 12, 1980 and August 27 - September 2, 1980.

⁴⁷ At NOW's December Board meeting an initial straw poll gave Mondale 25 votes to 12 for Cranston. A motion to endorse Mondale then passed by 32 to 5. Once the decision was made virtually no active NOW members supported any other Presidential candidate. The few who did largely supported Sonia Johnson (once a candidate for President of NOW) in her bid for the Citizens Party nomination.

⁴⁸ Information in this section was based on observations and interviews at the 1984 Conventions of the Republican Party in Dallas, and the Democratic Party in San Francisco, and on interviews with Party and feminist activists in Washington, D.C. during 1984. Some of this material appeared in off our backs, February, 1985, pp. 11-13, 20.

⁴⁹ Quoted in Jeffrey Pressman, "Groups and Group Caucuses", Political Science Quarterly, 92:4, Winter 1977-78, p. 680.

⁵⁰ Edward Shils, "Center and Periphery," Selected Essays, Chicago: Center for Social Organization Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1970.

⁵¹ Freeman, p. 234.