Thank you to Florida for
Hillary for sharing both the story and the meme on Twitter!
(You can share visit them on Twitter here!)
Seriously, if you missed
the Terkel/Connetta article recently published in the Huffington Post, put aside an hour or so today to read one of the
best pieces of work I've seen in media for a long time.
It's
historic, informative, timely and a great lesson in just whose
shoulders women stand on as Democrats prepare to vote a woman to
be the 2016 Democratic nominee for President of the United States –
for the first time.
Out of respect for the
work done by all who were involved in bringing this
mixed media story to "press", I have limited my excerpts to just
enough to tempt you to read the story in it's entirety. What follows
are some highlights of what you will see when you click the link to
the story below:
They deserve to have to go directly to the story to be counted as a reader of it.
Trust me and do it! TY!
➡️ In 1952, when Nancy
D’Alesandro was 12, her father ― then the mayor of Baltimore ―
brought her with him to the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago.
Young Nancy D’Alesandro
grew up to be Nancy Pelosi, the first female speaker of the House.
➡️ The Huffington Post spoke
with Pelosi and other Democratic women who have fought their whole
lives to make this moment possible ― from shifting the conventions’
decision making out of those male-only smoke-filled backrooms to
electing female candidates to political offices across the country.
➡️ These women have waited
their whole lives to see a woman in the White House. And they’ll be
in Philadelphia later this month to see Clinton accept the
nomination.
➡️ Here: A fabulous graphic of
“Historic Moments For Democratic Women” from 1900 to 2016
➡️ Women have attended every
Democratic convention since the first in 1832, but for decades they
were just guests and observers, supporting the men running the show.
It wasn’t until 1900 that the first woman attended as a delegate,
and not until 1920 did women have the constitutional right to vote in
the election.
➡️ In 1951, President Harry
Truman asked DNC official India Edwards, a former Chicago journalist
and longtime party activist, to be party chair. She declined,
arguing that men in the party weren’t ready for a woman to lead
them.
“I feel that if it were
a year earlier, then I might be willing to run the risk,” Edwards
said she told Truman. “But it is too close to a presidential
election, and if anything went wrong they’d blame it on the
woman. ... I’ll tell you, Mr. President, if I were chairman of the
committee, I would be so busy protecting my rear I could never look
forward.”
But the party was changing
― and so was the country.
➡️ Four years later, the
concerns that many in the party had about their lack of
representation spilled out in front of a national television audience
when the Chicago convention erupted in violence. Inside the hall,
fights broke out, motivated largely by tensions over the Vietnam War.
Outside the hall, a small army of police, National Guardsmen and Army
troops mobilized by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley clashed violently
with thousands of protesters who had come to the city.
“What came out of that
was a sense that we needed to open up the process of conventions,”
said Joanne Howes, a longtime Democratic activist. “That it
shouldn’t just be smoke-filled rooms and these guys making all
these decisions. Small-d democrats should be part of the
decision-making process.”
➡️ Ann Lewis was in her 30s,
working for the mayor of Boston, when a friend invited her to an
organizing meeting for the National Women’s Political Caucus in the
early 1970s. Pioneering feminists like Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm,
Betty Friedan, Millie Jeffrey and Gloria Steinem had started the new
group to make sure that women, not just women’s issues, would be
part of the political process.
“You know that famous
‘click’? That was my click,” remembered Lewis, who was
political director for the Democratic National Committee from 1981 to
1985, served in President Bill Clinton’s administration and later
worked as a top adviser to Hillary Clinton. “Because here were
all these women saying, ‘We work for equality through the
political process.’ But equality in the political
process? Why is it when you walk through a campaign headquarters, the
women are out front making phone calls, doing the work, and the guys
are in the backroom doing meetings? We’re better than this. We’ve
got more talent than this.”
➡️ Early on, the NWPC ―
which was then bipartisan ― recognized the importance of the
conventions. The group’s goal, according to Steinem’s
autobiography My Life on the Road, was to increase “the number
and diversity of women and delegates to both the Republican and
Democratic National Conventions of 1972, and to get the Equal Rights
Amendment, reproductive freedom, and other basic issues of equality
written into both parties’ platforms.”
➡️ But as Germond, Lewis and
the NWPC worked for change behind the scenes, Rep. Shirley Chisholm
decided to step forward and run. A fiercely progressive black
congresswoman from New York, Chisholm sought the 1972 presidential
nomination herself, jumping into a crowded Democratic field.
➡️ The NWPC made its first
appearance at the Democratic convention that year, with members going
as either delegates or attendees pushing to ensure that feminists
were heard. The group managed to insert a “Rights of Women”
section with an endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment into the
platform...
➡️ One notable advancement in
1972 was that, for the first time, a woman of color served as the
convention’s vice chair. Yvonne Brathwaite Burke hadn’t even
planned on attending, because she was busy running for Congress in
Los Angeles and had just gotten married. Unbeknownst to her, the
rules committee had selected her for the job. She was, in many ways,
the ideal choice: She satisfied African-Americans who wanted a black
vice chair and feminists who wanted a woman.
She first heard about her
historic role when reporters showed up outside her house.
➡️ Some men lamented the
newly serious role for women. In “Year of the Woman,” a “fantasy”
documentary about the 1972 convention, Washington Post columnist Art
Buchwald reminisced about the “hurdy-gurdy” of the old days, when
“the streets were full of young girls dancing, pretty girls in
their skirts and saddle shoes and waving pom-poms.”
➡️ For all the missteps, 1972 was still a turning point...
“It gave genesis to a lot of women saying, ‘Whoa, we need to get involved here,’” she said. Germond and some friends started meeting at each other’s kitchen tables and eventually launched the Los Angeles chapter of the NWPC. They surveyed the landscape of races where a woman could run a credible campaign, and by 1976, they had their first female member of the California state Senate.
All over the country, other women were holding similar meetings ― and winning similar victories.
➡️ The 1976 convention saw other victories for women, like the keynote address from Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), the first woman and first African-American to deliver such a speech at the Democrats’ big event. Jordan had come to national attention two years earlier, with her eloquently thunderous denunciations of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate hearings.
Feminist leaders succeeded
in getting an equal division rule adopted at the Democrats’ 1978
midterm gathering. It went into effect at the 1980 convention, again
in New York, and remains the rule today.
➡️ “The big thing that went
on at these conventions was the fancy parties,” said Pat Schroeder,
who went to her first convention in 1980 as a congresswoman from
Colorado. “And usually, women weren’t invited to the fancy
parties. Women usually had a couple of women’s caucus meetings and
things like that. We were going to meetings. The guys were going to
parties.”
➡️ Ellen Malcolm, a former
NWPC press secretary, said that many of the existing women’s groups
simply didn’t have the resources to make a difference in elections.
“By and large, except
for a handful of congresswomen, when it came to big-time politics,
women were nothing more than envelope stuffers,” she wrote in her
autobiography, When Women Win.“Washington was essentially a
men’s club.”
So Malcolm and 20 other
women decided to create a donor network of women and men who would
contribute money to certain approved female candidates. The plan was
to get money to them early in their campaigns ― a way of convincing
the old boys’ network that female candidates could be viable and
deserving of establishment support. That effort became EMILY’s
List, which today has more than 3 million members and is a powerhouse
in the Democratic Party. (EMILY originally stood for “Early Money
Is Like Yeast.”)
Eleanor Smeal, then
president of the National Organization for Women, was one of the
first people to notice that women were voting differently from men.
She looked at the data from the 1980 presidential election and saw
that women’s support for Jimmy Carter exceeded men’s by 8
percentage points, while men leaned more toward Ronald Reagan.
Against that backdrop,
people began to suggest that the Democrats might pick a woman to run
for vice president in 1984.
➡️ (Geraldine) Ferraro’s
nomination remains a defining moment for many Democratic women.
In the end, Mondale and
Ferraro lost by a landslide, and Americans would have to wait a long
time to see another woman on a major-party ticket.
➡️ I'm just going to note
the subtitle here: “‘I Guess Togas Don’t Come In A Size 14
Petite’” and tell you it is a Senator Mikulski quote!
➡️ Other female politicians
were also criticized, sometimes harshly, for not fitting a male
mold.
Then-Rep. Pat Schroeder
chaired the presidential campaign of fellow Coloradan Gary Hart. The
former senator was a strong candidate for the 1988 Democratic
nomination until his scandal-tinged withdrawal in early 1987.
Schroeder explored running in his place but eventually announced she
wouldn’t do so in an emotional press conference ― at which she
cried some.
The backlash was intense.
➡️ But the 1988 Democratic
convention did offer a memorable high point for women, when Ann
Richards, then the Texas state treasurer, became just the second
woman in 160 years to give the convention’s keynote address. She
delivered these unforgettable lines about the power of women: “But
if you give us a chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did
everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and
in high heels.”
➡️ Another sub-title here: “The
Anita Hill Wake-Up Call” (Not a good time for either side of the
aisle.)
➡️ The fact that there were
no women on the Senate committee hearing Hill’s complaint stirred
up greater interest in electing women, said Malcolm, the EMILY’s
List founder. Congresswomen in the House were infuriated with what
was happening in the upper chamber, and a number of them took to the
floor on Oct. 9, 1991, to deliver 60-second speeches on the issue.
Seven female House members interrupted a Senate Democratic caucus
lunch to request a hearing for Hill.
“It electrified the
country ― I don’t think there’s any question about it,” said
Rep. Slaughter, one of the members who stormed the Senate.
That fury helped drive
major gains in the 1992 elections, which swept four more women into
the Senate, Democrats all ― Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of
California, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, and Patty Murray of
Washington. Twenty new Democratic women were elected to the House,
and EMILY’s List grew from 3,000 to 24,000 members. It was dubbed
the “Year of the Woman.”
➡️ Clinton will claim the
Democratic nomination 144 years after Victoria Woodhull first
launched a presidential bid with the Equal Rights Party, 44 years
after Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to seek the Democratic
nomination and 32 years after Geraldine Ferraro made her historic
vice presidential bid. Many women today never thought they’d see a
real chance of electing a female president in their lifetime. Others
wonder what the hell took so long.
Clinton supporters stress
over and over that they don’t back the former secretary of
state just because she is a woman. But she is a woman who has managed
to get this far in an arena that long shut women out. And they’re
excited about what a Clinton win could mean for future generations.
Lewis anticipates that the
country will see “the second great wave” of women entering
politics if Clinton is victorious in November.
“You cannot want what
you can’t even imagine,” she said. “It’s very hard to get up
every day and work for something that seems absolutely out-of-sight
impossible. A woman in the White House means to everybody, ‘Oh, I
can do this.’ Not just, by the way, for women, but anyone who has
thought you’re ruled out.”
Thank you for reading!
G., aka
Partisan Democrat
(
Please follow at http://gkmtnblogs.blogspot.com/
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