Why Not a Woman?

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In Duluth, a retired 56-year-old fire fighter named Roger Armstrong says, "Ability and intelligence have nothing to do with gender. For an old blue-collar Polack [on his mother's side] like me, that's a hell of an admission." Workers in Chicago bars accepted Jane Byrne as mayor without any sense of trauma or endangered masculinity. Studs Terkel, anthropologist of the working class, explains: "The issue is dead. The guys in the bar have been conditioned by idols like Barbara Stanwyck. Now they're ready for a Gerri Ferraro or a Pat Schroeder."

There is disagreement. Says Don Sweitzer, an Ohio labor union consultant: "Labor people have that old macho attitude. They want a woman who stays in the home and the man outside working. It's a real serious problem if you have a woman Vice President." Roxanne Conlin reports something of the same trouble with farmers when she was campaigning for Governor of Iowa in 1982. "The sort of thing one does is campaign at grain elevators," she says. "I'd walk in and say, 'Hi, I'm Roxanne Conlin and I'm running for Governor.' People would stand there, like 'you're kidding.' One man just laughed for five minutes straight." Conlin lost, but most Iowa political analysts attributed her defeat to the disclosure that she and her millionaire husband paid minimal taxes in 1981.

Greg Dixon, the former national secretary of the Moral Majority, claims religious grounds for opposing both the Equal Rights Amendment and the idea of running a woman for Vice President. "I think God has a plan for men to be responsible for affairs of government," he says. "The Bible just teaches that the head of the man is Christ, the head of the woman is man, and that's God's order of things. God has made the woman, biologically and physiologically, keeper of the home. It is rare to find a woman to stand up to the rigors of politics."

Although it is not mentioned often, there lurks in some minds an atavistic suspicion that women are not stable enough to occupy positions of leadership. Fourteen years ago, Dr. Edgar Berman, a friend of Hubert Humphrey's, produced a baroque masterpiece of sexism when he proposed that women were unfit for public office because every month they were subject to a "raging hormonal unbalance." It is a pernicious and ridiculous idea that is refuted by experience (women in positions of power do not behave any differently from men) and by logic (presumably women of mature leadership age would have passed menopause anyhow). The suspicion about feminine instability seems especially silly in the light of some of the bizarre behavior that men have exhibited in the White House—during the last days of the Nixon Administration, for example, or during the time when Lyndon Johnson was beleaguered there. Why be concerned that a woman might, in the throes of some monthly lunacy, want to nuke Leningrad? Of more concern might be a man in the White House with six stiff Scotches in him. The so-called premenstrual syndrome (depression, anger, in some rare cases, violence, around the time of menstruation) has been used successfully as a defense in a couple of murder trials in England, and that reawakened a flicker or two of what is, in fact, a bigoted canard.