Special Section: 50 Faces for America's Future

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through reading works of the early suffragists. In 1970 she helped form a NOW chapter in Pittsburgh and led the fight to get equal opportunity in scholastic sports and physical education for girls in Pennsylvania. In 1978 Smeal headed a successful effort to get Congress to extend the time limit for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She has also directed campaigns that prevented ten states that had passed the ERA from rescinding their positions, and is organizing grass-roots efforts in the down-to-the-wire fight to pass the amendment in three more states. Says Smeal: "The ERA is primarily an economic issue—of security for the homemaker and jobs for the average woman."

38. David A. Stockman, 32, has in three years earned a reputation on Capitol Hill for effectively delivering his moderate to conservative views. One device: sending detailed letters to colleagues, including one that helped defeat Carter's standby gas rationing plan ("It doesn't do what you think, but it does a lot you never imagined"). The bachelor Republican, who was graduated from Michigan State University and attended Harvard Divinity School, is known in his southern Michigan district for opposing excessive regulation of the auto industry. Last year he helped defeat Carter's complex hospital cost-containment bill because he felt it was "a cure worse than the disease." Stockman's main goal is to reduce the role of the Government in society and to chip away at "the social pork barrel—the tremendous pressure of parochial, narrowly defined interests."

39. Brandon Stoddard, 41, is the ivy League whiz kid who proved that networks can do better-quality programming and get high ratings at the same time. A senior vice president at ABC, Stoddard invented the mini-series back in 1974 with his presentation of QB VII. Since then, Stoddard has pulled good Nielsens with topical and historical programs: Friendly Fire; Rich Man, Poor Man; Washington: Behind Closed Doors; and, of course, Roots, the most watched program in television history. "We are trying to offer something unique and compelling. True events are rare these days," says Stoddard, who will also begin making films to be shown in theaters. On such subjects as civil rights and Viet Nam, Stoddard's shows have had a substantial impact on mass opinion.

40. Edward Stone, 43, is the chief scientist for the highly successful Voyager 2 space probe that last month sent back invaluable data on the ring around Jupiter. A cosmic ray physicist born in Iowa and educated at the University of Chicago, Stone teaches at Caltech and directs 100 scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is now working on a 1983 "solar-polar" mission that will orbit two satellites in opposite directions around the sun's poles. The aim: to learn more about how energy flows from the sun and affects the earth's environment. Says Dr. Bruce Murray, director of the J.P.L.: "It's hard to say where we'll be in 1986, but Ed Stone will be one of the key people in the leadership."

41. Barbara Boyle Sullivan, 42, criticizes the affirmative-action policies of corporations—and they pay her for it. Her consulting firm, Boyle/Kirkman Associates, which she founded with Colleague Sharon Kirkman Donegan in 1972, originally specialized in locating patterns of discrimination