It's Our Turn

At last, not being one of the boys looks like an advantage. It's the boys, after all, who are responsible for the federal deficit, nuclear waste dumps and the savings and loan debacle, to name but a few of the disasters proliferating in the national In basket. Women politicians, who suffered from not being insiders, are benefiting from having been outsiders while the mess was made.

Cleaning up messes has long been relegated to women's work, as have certain other issues that have suddenly risen to the top of the political agenda, like worrying over the young, the aged, the sick and the environment. Surveys show that women are perceived to be better than men on these issues, as well as to have higher ethical standards and greater honesty. "Our stereotype," says Democratic Colorado Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, "is finally in." Pollster Mervin Field goes further, predicting that the 1990s will be the "decade of women in politics."

The decade is off to a fast start. In 1990 women entered races in record numbers, even exceeding the rush of 1972, when Senate passage of the Equal Rights Amendment gave women the incentive to run. This year 11 were candidates for Governor, 87 for Congress, eight for the Senate, and hundreds more for local office. Compare that with the paucity of female officeholders before Election Day: three women Governors (in Vermont, Nebraska and Arizona), 28 of the 435 Representatives in the House and just two of 100 Senators.

In California alone, 14 women jumped into campaigns: for Governor, lieutenant governor, state treasurer and insurance commissioner, and the mayoral races in Berkeley and San Jose. Five women ran for the U.S. House of Representatives and two for California secretary of state. Says Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus: "Women have been helping men get elected for years. We just decided to do it for ourselves."

The explosion of office seekers in California may have been due, in part, to the state's low threshold for boredom. "A woman candidate is automatically more interesting," says William Schneider, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, "a flash of fuchsia in a sea of gray." Pollster Field says when people sense that "politically, things are going to hell in a hand basket," a woman candidate becomes more appealing: "By not being part of the problem, she comes across as part of the solution."

Thus, when Houston became overbuilt, its freeways impassable and its streets filthy, voters picked their first woman mayor, Kathy Whitmire. "When people are frustrated and saying something needs to be done," she says, "they are willing to turn to somebody different." After the Texas economy went bust in the '80s, an unprecedented number of women were elected to straighten things out, including the mayors of Dallas, San Antonio and Corpus Christi. This year Ann Richards, who became the first woman to hold statewide office in Texas in a half-century when she was elected state treasurer in 1982, hoped for the same voter response in her knock-down, drag-out battle for the governorship.