Wine, Women and Throngs

"Althena had an advantage over us." Sissy Farenthold. Chair of the Woman's National Political Caucus (NWPC), sucked the convention members into her words like a pagan priestess mesmerizing a pack of willing iconoclasts. "She sprang full grown from the forehead of Zeus. Our movement is not ordained from on high and we hardly sprang full-grown. Our growth will come with painstaking effort".

She paused, eyes closed, as though she were pacing the convention's pulse. "The political resistance to ERA reflects a deeply embedded caste system in this country and it is time we recognized it for what it is. If there is no effort to put women out of sight, there clearly is a message to put them out of mind. Not only have we left foreign policy to the province of a class elite, we have left it to a sexual elite".

A shudder of agreement rippled down the caucus from Alabama to Wyoming. "Foreign Policy is vital to out survival and women must intrude on those decisions. That is our failure-that we do not have women senators to address us or women judges whose opinions we can read." Farenthold swooped down in a final damnation. "And we have no presidential candidate".

The presidential hopefuls were jittering around Boston City Hall, making nice to the caucus delegates and observers who had laid out fifteen dollars to drink a little wine and listen to the candidates make their bids. Fred Harris, a Democrat from Oklahoma, stood in a corner greeting strangers like long-lost friends.

"Mr.Haris, what do you think of Sissy Farenthold's statement this afternoon at the convention that the National Women's Political Caucus has no presidential candidate?"

"What do you mean? A woman?"

"No, I think she meant a candidate the caucus could strongly support".

Harris waved a hand at the women's electric rock band that had started jamming a minute before, clipped, "I can't hear you". and walked away.

The photographers at the press conference flashed shots of Sissy Farenthold's face in quick succession, making a stage of the Sheraton ballroom look like the setting of silent movie. "I must say I'm not particularly entranced with any candidate for president in this country. Many senators who have said they would support the Equal Right Amendment have note voted for it and I've seen this happen many times. It's a simple thing. We just want to be part of the U.S. Constitution.

Liz Carpenter former press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson and a founding member of the NWPC beamed down at the caucus wine-drinkers from the inter steps of Boston City Hall. "Welcome to the Boston lea Party. Women know what it is like to have taxation without representation".

Carpenter continued a gracious patter like a hostess casing a giant dinner party. "Someone once asked a friend of nine. How can you be the mother of two small children and a congresswoman at the same time", She replied. "Because I have a bratin and a uterus and I use both".

With a few due compliments, she yielded the floor to Terry Sanford, a lanky grey-haired Democrat from North Carolina Sanford posed stiffly at the podium. Pushing honesty from his rail splitting brows to his log cabin tweeds. "I would like to quote from Abigail Adams. Do not put unlimited power in the hands of the husbands or we will be prompted to foment revolution. Well I hope that ERA passes. I'm not just offering you empty promises because throughout my political life what I've promised I've always kept. I would like to include in the Democratic platform political equality, equal educational opportunity, equal work opportunities and equal pay and access for women into the economic power structure".

A lot of caucus members were really impressed by the presidential candidates appearances at their national convention at the Boston Sheraton the last weekend in June. Some see it as a sign that the two-year-old caucus is beginning to be recognized by the political status quo. They figure that the candidates must think the caucus has some political punch if they took the trouble to show up at the convention. Others wonder whether the speeches were just a lot of empty words and political manipulation.

One delegate said she doubted the sincerity of any presidents, present or future. "If Ford doesn't listen to his wife, why should he listen to us?" Another suggested that the candidates appearance at this year's convention did not necessarily prove they are concerned about women's issues because their campaign schedule is pretty light now. "The acid test would be if they come next year at this time when there will be more competition for their time".

The fact remains that the women's caucus has stopped patting itself on the back for existing as it did at its founding convention in Houston two years ago and begun to get down to the business of practical politics, which, in the opinion of most members, means dealing with men.

The NWPC's line on men has been in flux since the Houston convention. Elective strategy has rotated on the question of whether or not to support male candidates. The original thrust of caucus policy was to get women into political office. The caucus decided that if a woman were running against a man, and the caucus could in in good conscience bank the women, it would under no circumstances back the man.

That still holds as a general rule, but the primary focus of this year's convention was on ways of getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Most members seem to believe that a woman who says she will support ERA is more trustworthy than a man who makes that claim, but if a conservative woman were running against a pro. ERA man, the caucus would not necessarily rule out backing the man. In any case, in most strategic races a woman's candidacy is not in question, so the caucus usually must choose between two men.

Political strategy aside. the NWPC is becoming more receptive to men because it seems that men are showing more interest in the caucus. Many members have found that made politicians started taking the caucus more seriously when it scored several successes in pushing its candidates for Congressional elections last year.

In a move toward working with men on women's issue this year's convention passed a resolution allowing men into the caucus--to the dismay of many members. One delegate said she was afraid the presence of men in the caucus would intimidate women who weren't used to dealing with men on an equal basis. Another said the resolution was "the worst thing that could have happened I here's move merit to the idea that out search for equality should include men. But women's politics puts you in an adversary position with the make establishment. How can that be reconciled. "A New York delegate claimed that made in filtration" had already begun anyway through women who were appointed to political office by men. "They simply are not free agents". She said.

While the new treaty with men offers a tempting apple of political expediency, it also poses a dilemma: Will the NWPC make "an impact on the male power structure", as Farenthold claims it has, or will it be absorbed by the male status quo? "I depends on how seriously men take us, one delegate said. "It they think were important, they'll grab us".

What the NWPC is grappling with are the problems of a group that seeks to encompass as wide a popular base as possible. Even without men, the convention fairly bristled with muted friction between whites and blacks, have and have nots. Predictably, whites have dominated the convention and that was the source of the problem.

A group of black women had prepared a workshop slated for the morning before the convention entitled "Concerns of Afro-American Women." The panelists Planned their discussion expecting their audience to be mostly white women. Only a few showed up. Gloria Nelms, the moderator of the workshop. said the group was "really disappointed when so few white women showed up. This is not the sixties when we excluded whites from out meetings. When they didn't come, we asked ourselves way".

A white college teacher said the racial tension come out during the convention in "turns of phrase". She said the caucus was risking the same mistakes made by the women's suffrage movement, which alienated the abolitionists by protesting the enfranchisement of black illiterates in the face of educated women's exclusion from the vote. "If we drive out the black women, the Puerto Rican women, the Chicanos and Oriental women, we will be playing right into the hands of the male power establishment. It will destroy the caucus".

Racial friction seemed to be on a lot of people's minds-even though few would really talk about it-because it turned out to be a factor in the election of Audrey Rowe Colom, a black Republican, as the new NWPC Chair. Colom, however, downplayed the tensions that gnawed at the convention. "I think that what you saw here this weekend was sisterhood and that sisterhood transcended racial, ethnic and party lines".

For the most part, Colom was right because the primary work of the convention-the adoption of a strategy for pushing through ERA-was accomplished with little real bickering and a sisterly sense of purpose.

The goal of the ERA strategy adopted by the convention is to see to it that four more out of the remaining twenty states ratify the amendment before March 1979. Koryne Horbal, a member of the NWPC Administrative Committee of Minnesota, said at a strategy planning workshop. "The key to success next year must be to get people to take ERA seriously as a civil rights issue that goes far beyond the women's movement".

Actually, political pleas are to be left to the discretion of each local caucus. The important national policy switch was to forget about Congressional elections and concentrate resources in a few target states that are the most likely to ratify ERA. The consensus was that it its still too early to name the target states but it is probable that the list will include Illinois, where the ERA is pending in the state legislature, and Missouri, which defeated the ERA this year by only four votes in the State Senate following House passage.

Rosemary Smithson, Chair of the Missouri ERA Coalition, outlined the elective strategy. "We must get women to focus, not on national candidates, but on replacing those legislators who have previously noted no. Where there is an apparent pattern of defeats in State Senate races we must concentrate our energies on electing women who will be active supporters of the measure Our slogan is. "Women are supposed to clean house. We must also clean the Senate."

In order to raise funds for its massive ERA campaign drive, the caucus resolved to organize a national telethon slated for the first quarter of 1976. Nancy Deale Greene, who proposed the resolution, plans to approach 60 corporations to raise $2.5 million. The idea is to cover the costs of the telethon so that all money it brings in will be cleared for the national campaign. The telethon would coincide with the end of International Women's Year and with the Bicentennial".

Mrs. Green said. "Believe me, there will be no Bicentennial for women unless we have the Equal Rights Amendment".

The NWPC seems pretty will organized for the next few years and most members are optimistic about the neat future. But will the caucus long withstand the problems of its broad-based policy? Will it shatter under the conflicting demands of its diverse members? Some delegates are asking those questions, although most like to keep the whole thing pretty hushed. Most seem to prefer looking towards the future through Audrey Colom's eyes; "I would like to see ten years from now the need for the NWPC to dissolve. I would like to see women entrenched in the political parties. I don't think that is going to happen. So I think there will be a need for the caucus for a long time. When we get a woman president, that will be the signal that the caucus's mission has been accomplished".