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When Women Win: EMILY's List and the Rise of Women in American Politics
384Overview
The dramatic inside story of the rise of women in elected office over the past quarter-century, from the pioneering founder of three-million-member EMILY's List — one of the most influential players in today’s political landscape In 1985, aware of the near-total absence of women in Congress, Ellen R. Malcolm launched EMILY’s List, a powerhouse political organization that seeks to ignite change by getting women elected to office. The rest is riveting history: Between 1986 — when there were only 12 Democratic women in the House and none in the Senate — and now, EMILY’s List has helped elect 19 women Senators, 11 governors, and 110 Democratic women to the House.
Incorporating exclusive interviews with Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Tammy Baldwin, and others, When Women Win delivers stories of some of the toughest political contests of the past three decades, including the historic victory of Barbara Mikulski as the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right; the defeat of Todd Akin (“legitimate rape”) by Claire McCaskill; and Elizabeth Warren’s dramatic win over incumbent Massachusetts senator Scott Brown.
When Women Win includes Malcolm's own story — the high drama of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment testimony against Clarence Thomas and its explosive effects on women’s engagement in electoral politics; the long nights spent watching the polls after months of dogged campaigning; the heartbreaking losses and unprecedented victories — but it’s also a page-turning political saga that may well lead up to the election of the first woman president of the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544443310 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HMH Books |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2016 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
As founder, president, and chair of EMILY’s List, Ellen Malcolm has helped level the political playing field for women candidates, brought millions of women voters to the polls, and created a powerful movement dedicated to restoring progressive values to American government. One of the largest and most successful political action committees in the country, EMILY’s List has over 3 million members and has helped elect 10 pro-choice Democratic women U.S. senators, 110 U.S. representatives, and 11 governors. Ellen Malcom lives in Washington, D.C.
Craig Unger has served as deputy editor of the New York Observer and was editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and cofounder/editorial director of Open Topic. He is the author of three critically acclaimed books, including Boss Rove, The Fall of the House of Bush, and House of Bush, House of Saud.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A POLITICAL EDUCATION
I WAS AN UNLIKELY political activist. I grew up in the fifties and sixties in Montclair, New Jersey, an upper-middle-class suburb outside of New York. When I was eight months old, my father died of cancer and my mother, Barbara, became a twenty-four-year-old widow. Three years later, Mom remarried and left her job at IBM to stay home and raise her children. Her decision to quit work was never in doubt. That's what women did in the fifties — if the family could afford it.
When I entered Hollins College, an all-women's school in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1965, I was an eighteen-year-old preppie who was essentially apolitical. This was an era when men's schools and women's schools were more common than they are today, and it did not even occur to me to go to a coed school. I didn't even really know the difference between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. I'd never heard of Vietnam, much less realized we were at war there, and I didn't even know that hundreds of thousands of Americans were protesting.
But, in 1968, at the urging of a friend, I went to Philadelphia to work for Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar senator from Minnesota, during the Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania. I knocked on doors, handed out literature, and talked to people about the issues. McCarthy won 71 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania. I had just turned twenty-one and was now eager to vote in my first presidential election.
It was 1968 in America. All across the country, the counterculture of the sixties was ascendant. A generation of antiwar protesters and longhaired hippies were replacing buttoned-down, crew-cut frat boys and sweater-and-pearls sorority sisters. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones were on the airwaves. On the other side of the globe, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive against South Vietnam. U.S. campuses were in an uproar. On March 31, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.
Four days later, on April 4, 1968, I was crossing the Hollins campus when I heard that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Hundreds of thousands of people rioted in New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities. On June 6, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. There were countless demonstrations all over the country.
My political innocence was over. Both Montclair and my family were Republican to the core, but I headed off in a very different direction. Too much of what was happening in the sixties was close to home — literally. Just eleven miles from Montclair, Newark was the epicenter of the most violent racial upheavals of the time. The year before, six days of rioting, looting, and violence left 26 people dead, more than 700 injured, and 1,500 arrested — not to mention millions of dollars in damages. In the aftermath of the King assassination, civil unrest spread to 125 cities.
To affluent suburbanites like me, all this was shocking. By that summer, I was fully committed to fighting poverty and racism, as well as the war. I believed that job training could help the unemployed, so my mother found me a volunteer job at the Manpower Development program in Newark. There I was, a nice, young, MG-driving white girl from Hollins, whose mother was urging her to join the Junior League, working on Broad Street in Newark — not far from the riot-torn ghetto. It was an eye-opening experience.
In August, the McCarthy campaign sent out word that staffers and volunteers should stay away from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, so I watched it on TV from the comfort of home. In the aftermath of the MLK and RFK assassinations, Chicago was the apex of counterculture protest. For five days, thousands of Chicago police fought demonstrators in the streets, while nearby, in the International Amphitheater, the Democratic Party selected Vice President Hubert Humphrey as its presidential nominee.
By the time I returned to campus for my senior year, I had become Hollins's version of a campus activist. Granted, I didn't build bombs or take over the administration building. But I had changed. I went to Charlottesville to hear blues singer Janis Joplin give us "Another Piece of My Heart." I went to civil rights meetings. And, in my own decorous way, I did something audacious: I invited the college president to the campus dining hall as part of a campaign to allow Hollins's students to wear pants.
As a measure of exactly how radical I was, I took the defiantly militant step of wearing pants to the meeting. Lo and behold, soon enough the rules were changed. It wasn't exactly rabble-rousing, but it was my first taste of political success, and I loved it.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1970, I moved to Washington, D.C. I had learned about a new nonpartisan, grassroots "citizens' lobby" called Common Cause that focused on campaign-finance reform, election reform, accountability, and the media. I arrived when the organization was just six months old. Our first goal was to end the Vietnam War.
Common Cause took a less attention-getting but more pragmatic tack than those used by most antiwar groups: its goal was to cut off the federal funds that allowed the war to continue. My job was to oversee a small army of volunteers to mobilize public pressure on senators and representatives to pass our agenda. We didn't have the money that the special interests had, but we had created a new kind of organization as a counterweight: a citizens' lobby that harnessed the voices of ordinary Americans. I focused on organizing volunteer lobbying groups in congressional districts and on keeping volunteers informed and excited so they would work successfully. In addition to our antiwar efforts, we initiated campaign-finance-reform legislation to limit how much money individuals and organizations could give to candidates, to make those contributions public, and to establish an independent organization to oversee campaign financing.
Campaign-finance reform wasn't the kind of issue that captured the imagination of the American people. But it soon became clear that our work was part of something much bigger. In 1971, Common Cause sued the Democratic and Republican Parties, asserting that both parties were ignoring the Federal Campaign Practices Act of 1925. In response, Congress quickly passed the Federal Election Campaign Act to increase disclosure of campaign contributions. The law went into effect on April 7, 1972, just as the new presidential season got under way.
The names of the Republican donors soon turned out to have enormous historic value. The reason? Three months later, on June 17, 1972, five men paid by Nixon's Committee to Reelect the President (aptly shortened to CREEP) broke into and entered the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington. Over the next two years, as the Watergate scandal unraveled on national TV, the names of those donors became essential to following the money — which was the key to getting to the bottom of the entire scandal. And the reason those names became public was that Common Cause sued CREEP, thereby forcing it to reveal who had contributed millions of dollars — much of it cash literally stuffed into suitcases and satchels.
As a result, I had a front-row seat to one of the greatest political spectacles of the century: a psychodrama about paranoia and power starring Richard Milhous Nixon that had the entire nation glued to its TVs. A generation before anyone had even heard of binge-watching, this was reality TV.
It all came to a head on August 8, 1974, when, rather than face impeachment by the House of Representatives and near-certain conviction by the Senate, Nixon became the first president of the United States to resign from office. To this day, I can see Richard Nixon stopping at the door of his helicopter, awkwardly waving good-bye to his presidency and to his reputation in history.
Shortly after Nixon's departure, Congress passed a sweeping campaign finance-reform bill designed to minimize candidates' reliance on huge donations from special interests. Not long after that, Congress cut funding to South Vietnam from a proposed $1.26 billion to $700 million. A year later, in 1975, the United States withdrew all troops from South Vietnam. Saigon fell. I was proud of what we had done: the funding cuts that Common Cause had lobbied for had finally brought an end to the Vietnam War.
My political education had begun. I had learned how electoral politics work, how bills are written and become law, and the nuts and bolts of campaigning. I had learned how political campaigns are funded, how lobbyists effectively buy access to incumbent members of Congress, and how that access leads to legislation that serves the lobbyists' interests. All of this knowledge would come in handy in the future.
CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE antiwar movements weren't the only social crusades sweeping America. In 1960, just forty years after women finally won the right to vote in the United States, the widespread availability of the birth control pill for the first time gave women the power to separate sexual activity from procreation, thereby allowing them to postpone having children so that they might pursue careers that had long been out of reach.
Soon, a new wave of feminists took on issues such as reproductive rights, sexuality, discrimination in the workplace, and various other inequities. In 1963, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan's landmark best seller, described what she called "the problem that has no name"— namely, the plight of women who, despite living in material comfort and being married with children, were unhappy. In large measure, that was because they were treated as second-class citizens in both their personal and professional lives.
Even though feminists were often lampooned as bra-burning "women's libbers," the movement continued to grow. One milestone followed another. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded, with Friedan as its president. Journalist Gloria Steinem became a major feminist voice. In 1968, the word sexism was coined. The next year, NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, was launched. In 1970, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch became must-reads. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to Congress, became the first major-party black candidate for president. Through it all, there was "Battling Bella" Abzug, the brassy and exuberant New York congresswoman known for her famously floppy hats and a voice Norman Mailer said "could boil the fat off a taxicab driver's neck." Asserting that "this woman's place is in the House — the House of Representatives," Abzug gave a feisty feminist cast to the few women who were entering electoral politics.
And last, but hardly least, in 1973, the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, creating a litmus-test issue that forever redefined the battleground of reproductive rights.
By that time, Gloria Steinem, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and others had launched Ms. magazine, which quickly became a feminist bible chronicling the ascent of feminism not just as a social movement but as a new consciousness. As Jane O'Reilly put it in the magazine's introductory issue, the "click" was the "moment of truth ... the shock of recognition," the sudden awareness that what was widely believed to be the natural order of things in gender relations was in fact shockingly out of whack. It was the realization that men and women often used very different languages in talking to each other, and the awakening to the reality that millions of enormously bright, accomplished women were frustrated and unfulfilled, relegated to servile roles where they were paid little or no attention, and imprisoned by rigid and limiting expectations as housewives.
IN THE CONTEXT of all that, exactly where did I stand?
I was certainly aware of Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Ms. magazine, but the women's movement was largely foreign to me. I didn't even think of myself as a feminist.
In Montclair, my mother's path to employment as a secretary required one essential skill: typing. That's how women got into the corporate world back then. Many years later, I realized that my mother's skills were equal to those of many executive men. As president of the Junior League of Montclair, as chair of the local Essex County branch of the United Way, and through her other work, she managed budgets, gave speeches, brought meetings to order, and won elections. Yet to Mom, it was a given that men were the breadwinners and women took care of the kids. I was brought up to believe that women could be secretaries, teachers, or nurses, but there were limits as to how far they could go. Before college, it hadn't even occurred to me that women could be professionals. But all that was beginning to change.
When they did enter the professional world, however, even the most highly credentialed women encountered various forms of sexism. Many years later, I discovered that this was the case for a twenty-one-year-old senior at Wellesley College who went into Cambridge, Massachusetts, one day to take the LSATs so she could apply to law school. Once she got there, Hillary Rodham encountered several young men who didn't like the idea that women were competing with them. This was a period during which a law-school student deferment meant exemption from the Vietnam War draft, and one of them told her, "If you take a spot, I could end up going to Vietnam. You'll be responsible for me dying."
"It sounds ridiculous now," Hillary told me, "but there wasn't a hint of humor in it."
After being accepted by both Harvard and Yale Law Schools, Hillary returned to Cambridge to attend a Harvard cocktail party where a friend introduced her to a well-known law professor. "This is Hillary Rodham," the friend said. "She's trying to decide whether to come here next year or sign up with our closest competitor."
Without missing a beat, the Harvard professor looked down at Hillary dismissively. "First," he said, "we don't have any close competitors. And second, we don't need any more women at Harvard."
That made Hillary's decision simple: she went to Yale.
Hillary, like so many women of her generation, continued to encounter archaic attitudes about gender in even the most progressive precincts of the law. In 1974, as a twenty-six-year-old graduate of Yale Law School, Hillary was the only woman lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee staff during Richard Nixon's impeachment hearings, having been hired by John Doar, the chief counsel for the committee and an iconic figure in the American civil rights movement. At the time, Hillary was dating Bill Clinton, who had gone back to Arkansas to run for Congress, but, like Doar himself, she often worked late into the night. "I was there at roughly midnight one night, doing my work," Hillary said. "And he was wandering around, seeing what work people were doing. By then, he knew that I was dating Bill. And here this avatar of the civil rights movement comes in and says, 'Can I ask you a question?'" "Sure, Mr. Doar," Hillary replied.
"Well, why are you here while your boyfriend is running for Congress? You're not supporting him."
Doar went on to say that he was delighted that Hillary was there working late into the night. But there it was: even when highly accomplished women were working in the most progressive circles imaginable, a man's work always took precedence over his mate's.
That needed to change, too.
CHAPTER 2A MOVEMENT BEGINS
AFTER FOUR AND A HALF YEARS, I left Common Cause. It took me about another year of part-time work to find what I wanted: a job as press secretary for the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC). The caucus was the first national organization dedicated exclusively to increasing women's participation in the entire political sphere — as elected and appointed officials, as delegates to Republican and Democratic conventions, as federal and state judges, and as lobbyists, voters, and campaign organizers. Before the 1976 presidential race, the caucus met with Jimmy Carter and won support for proposals for appointing women to the cabinet and the Supreme Court. Thanks largely to the efforts of NWPC chairwoman Mildred "Millie" Jeffrey and NWPC Democratic Task Force chairwoman Joanne Howes, the party changed its rules to mandate "equal division" of delegates by gender at future Democratic conventions. That last groundbreaking decision meant that, starting in 1980, half the delegates at the Democratic National Convention would be women.
It was in this context that I began working for the NWPC, eventually as a press secretary, in pursuit of its extraordinarily ambitious primary objective: the ratification of a proposed amendment to the Constitution designed to guarantee equal rights for women — the Equal Rights Amendment. The mere fact that an amendment to the Constitution was necessary to guarantee equal rights to women was astonishing — but it was, and it had been since time immemorial.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "When Women Win"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Ellen R. Malcolm and Craig Unger.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
The Last Glass Ceiling,
A Political Education,
A Movement Begins,
Starting from Zero,
The Vicious Cycle (and How to Break It),
The Ferraro Factor,
The Founding Mothers,
A Distant Kingdom,
A Star Is Born,
How to Beat Bubba,
Nantucket Sleigh Ride,
The Year of the Woman,
Reversal of Fortune,
Leaping and Creeping,
The Next Piece of the Puzzle,
Madam Speaker,
Down to the Wire,
EMILY's List 2.0,
Women Make It Work,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Index,
About the Authors,
Connect with HMH,
Footnotes One,
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