Why Not a Woman?

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Toward the end of 1919, Woodrow Wilson's health broke down and he went into a kind of exhausted twilight. He withdrew to his bedroom upstairs at the White House. He saw almost no one. Edith Wilson began receiving Cabinet members in the next room, relaying what she said were her husband's wishes. Wilson's enemies on Capitol Hill claimed that she had taken over the Administration. "Mrs. Wilson is President!" shouted Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico. "We have petticoat government!"

The idea, needless to say, struck Fall as an outrage. What offended as much as the usurpation was the sex of the usurper. The U.S. has always been a patriarchal arrangement, at least in its politics. Presidents were to be, in the racy formula that Queen Elizabeth I once used, "crested, not cloven." The American political style savored of saloons and cigars, and took its vocabulary (front runner, dark horse) from the race track. It was Founding Fathers, not Founding Mothers, who drafted the Constitution. Abigail Adams once wrote to her husband John, "I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors." The Fathers were not. American women did not—could not—even vote for the first 133 years of the Republic.

American politics is still a predominantly masculine exercise. But today, as their lives have opened out into new careers and broader avenues of participation in American life, women are acquiring political power to a degree that they never have before. Relatively few women occupy major offices; there is only one woman in a Governor's mansion (Kentucky's), two in the Senate and 22 in the House. But women officeholders are proliferating at the state and local levels, steadily filling the channels of talent that lead to Capitol Hill and, eventually, the White House (see following story). As voters, women are now making themselves a potentially decisive presence in national politics. Indeed, some Republicans are afraid that Ronald Reagan's lagging popularity among women could cost him the election this fall.

To exploit that gender gap fully, some Democrats are flirting with an idea that has as much risk as logic: nominating a woman to run for Vice President. House Speaker Tip O'Neill is behind it. So are Democratic Governors Mario Cuomo of New York and Richard Celeste of Ohio. The National Organization for Women and the National Women's Political Caucus are scrambling to line up organized support for a woman Vice President. In recent weeks, Walter Mondale and Gary Hart have been asked at every stop whether they would run with a woman; Jesse Jackson already has promised to choose a woman in the unlikely event he is nominated. The thought of a woman Veep, which sounded a little farfetched just a few months ago, has suddenly acquired a life of its own. Says New York City Mayor Ed Koch: "A woman on the ticket would bring more women, and not just women. It would attract young people, because of the idea of a breakthrough. Let me tell ya, it would be better than chicken soup."