Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Gerry and Golda and Eleanor. . ." in Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 167-169). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Autumn 1984
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
What do you think of Geraldine Ferraro, they want to know. Are you pleased by her nomination as vice-president? Do you think she’s competent? Do you like her? Will you vote for her?
Yes; yes; probably not; and no, in that order.
I was just as surprised as everybody else by her selection as Democratic running mate. I never thought Mondale would take such a “radical” step. But in retrospect, after the enormous splash made by Jesse Jackson, it is obvious that only a female vice-presidential choice could have disconcerted and subdued the highly energized battalions who demanded that a Black be chosen.
Fritz Mondale and his wary advisers would hardly do the logical thing and designate a Black woman for the job, so they settled for a more muted ethnicity—a blond Italian. Nevertheless, a truly historic step forward was accomplished. The Republicans were caught unawares and shown up. And never again will gender be an issue for the twin major parties of the ruling stratum in this country.
The epic of Geraldine Ferraro is a direct and unmistakable result of the past 20 years of feminist upsurge. The women’s movement achieved this breakthrough into the perennial male bastion of establishment high politics. The wonder is that it took so long. The tragedy is that this is no winged, soaring victory but a hollow, and fruitless one for women.
What good is it for a woman to gain the whole world and use her power and influence to crush the souls and bodies of millions of afflicted women throughout the world? What lofty gains has the second sex attained in the wake of the real authority wielded by the likes of Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Clara Booth Luce, Eleanor Roosevelt, and all the rest of that illustrious pantheon of female achievers? What good is status and clout if they are wielded primarily to entrench the powers that be, to glorify and whitewash the predator class, to preside over the chronic degradation of women in the name of women, to perpetuate the fiction that if one of us makes it, all of us do?!
One of my old bosses, a Black man, once said to me, “Black freedom? That’s when I become president of General Motors.” I take issue with this widespread confusion of personal careerism with social reform. The current swelling crop of female lieutenants of the male power structure cannot, must not, be identified with true leaders and serious toilers for human rights and for basic, all-encompassing, and irreversible change. What possible difference does it make to a harassed and underpaid single mother that the harassers and underpayers are themselves female?
When we resurrected feminism 20 years ago, the battle cry was that women’s emancipation meant everyone’s emancipation. The quest for liberation was fused with the building of a new world, a new economic system, a new sisterhood/brotherhood of global equality and fraternity. To most of us, feminism meant socialism, and success meant smashing the prevailing code of profits, imperialism, assault on the environment, repression of thought, labor exploitation, and the vicious bigotries attached to skin color and sex and sex orientation and physical handicap.
But the single-issue reformist women who yearned for immersion into the system came to dominate over those who abhorred capitalism. And the horrifying end-product of the capitulation to the lures of the merchants of death, deception and despair was precisely the climate we live in today—the Reaganesque, narcissistic, anti-social, anti-intellectual, blood and gutsy chauvinism of American culture. When the women’s revolt funneled into the ancient channels and adopted the timeworn tactics of playing political wifey to the male power brokers, the huge gains of the ’60s and ’70s disappeared for everybody and Pharaoh ruled again.
Whether Ferraro is a nice lady or a bitch concerns me not one whit. Her millions don’t necessarily prejudice me, nor does her real-estate shark husband. What does repulse me is that she is all too patently capable of launching destroyers and activating missiles and invading Puerto Vallarta if need be and decimating what’s left of our “safety net” welfare program and life-supporting social benefits.
Ferraro, to me, is one of a new legion of educated, articulate, shrewd, attractive, smartly attired, and totally unprincipled shills for the bad guys. I would no more vote for her, or any Democrat, than I would for Cleopatra if I were an Egyptian slave.
A working woman has got to draw the electoral line somewhere!