Was Ferraro a Trailblazer or a Novelty?

No novelty to this woman. I come from a generation that expected women to hold traditional jobs as nurses, teachers, secretaries, and clerical workers. Then their job was to marry, have children and stay home. June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson were supposed to be our role models. Remember, “father knows best”. I preferred Joan Crawford and Betty Davis. The “broad shouldered dames”.
.
Amy, you are too young to know the suffocating culture women were taught to conform to in the past. You don’t know the road blocks that had to be avoided if a woman wanted a career as a doctor, lawyer, architect, engineer, etc. I remember vividly.
.
I had a girlfriend who was in pre-med. She was the only female and had to fight to get lab time because her instructor thought she was wasting her time. Even in a traditional profession women were held to a different standard. I taught in the early sixties and was told not to be seen in night clubs in our moderate sized town. Slacks were not allowed in the classroom (this was true as a college student also), dresses and skirts only. The list is endless.

.
So Geraldine Ferraro was a ground breaker for us. I never expected the “glass ceiling” to break wide open. Even though I knew that Mondale and Ferraro were not going to win against Reagan, I worked hard for their campaign.
.
As far as Time magazine’s covers, what do you expect from a magazine that has covers with Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck. I would expect them to ignore the 3rd most powerful person in Government at that time, Nancy Pelosi. The magazine covers are marketing tools, nothing more.
.
I never thought I would live long enough to see an African American or woman as president. One down, one to go. So, I still have hope.

I don’t think the undiscovered frontier is a female president. After Hillary Clinton, I don’t think anyone on the left or right would doubt the seriousness of such a candidate solely on gender. Furthermore, if a guy named Barack Hussein Obama can win North Carolina, anything’s possible.

Almost — I think the next test would be whether a brown person could get elected without having to apologize for their parents’ religion (cf Jindal, “Bobby”, or Haley, “Nikki”).

I dislike a LOT about Jindal, but honestly, Michele Bachmann would trounce him in the primaries. And I think a lot of that has to do with where this country’s discomfort lies.

I believe that, in reality, ideas and attitudes are not from revolution, but through evolution.

I was only thirteen, but, my mother was a chemist – not a nurse, not a teacher like her mother-in-law, not a secretary like her mother and knew that women of Ferraro’s time were changing things starting ten years before I was born.

Number of Catholics- not at all considered minorities or outsiders in the Northeast of the US – to become president 1. Number of Catholics to become vice president. Just Joe Biden.

New York had not yet seen it’s first black mayor in 1984 (still only one).

In 1984 a female candidate was a novelty. By contrast, Sarah Palin’s gender was a non-story thanks to, ironically, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi among others.

In the past fifteen years, however, many highly educated women have made plans to take advantage of how women live longer and remain healthier for longer than men, take five to ten years off to be a Mom and then intend to (and most likely will) work ten years past a man’s classic retirement age of 65 to age 75.

Women moving forward is a non-story to me. It has always been obvious to me.

The fact that there will, someday, be a woman in the White House is obvious is why for many of us it is a non-story.

“I proudly wore a “Mondale-Ferraro” button along with my own campaign swag throughout the fall of 1984.

.
As you continue to “proudly” wear the mantle of leftist, progressive, liberal today.
.
Surprise, surprise. NOT

http://phd9.blogspot.com/2011/02/perspecive.html

While we can lament the lack of progress, taking the long view shows that the drive for equality for all people may be slow, but it is also relentless.

A woman doesn’t have to actually win the presidency to prove that a woman can win the presidency. That might sound like a contradiction, but I think that Hillary frankly proved that a woman can win the White House. She lost the Democratic nomination to a highly charismatic opponent, but had she won, I think it’s reasonable to say that he chances against McCain would have been as good as Obama’s were. Also, she didn’t not get the nomination because of her gender. She just had to slug it out against a very. very good politician (and she did well, she just didn’t win.)

You know, there hasn’t been an Italian American president yet, or a Native American president. But I don’t think we’re fretting that “the country isn’t ready for it.” The right person just hasn’t run yet. That’s a big difference than saying the country won’t tolerate the general idea.

I think what gets lost is the fact that, for the first time, women were treated as a legitimate political force.
.
At the time, it was unknown what the exact details and makeup of that force would be, as they didn’t have polling and political science established to the degree we do now.
.
In that context, I think that applying 2011-think to an event in 1984 is a mistake too commonly made.
.
Recognition that this is true casts a different light on what we might perceive as “show boatery” now. It truly does reflect the historic moment when women finally were recognized as a true political force.

You know, there hasn’t been an Italian American president yet, or a Native American president.
.
Well, we might not have had a Native American president, but we have had one occupy the Vice President’s chair during the Herbert Hoover years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Curtis
.
I think the broader point is that with that even though there have been waves of immigrants that had a rough go when they first got here, within a couple of generations, their ethnicity was subordinated to the fact that they were European, as opposed to African or Asian, in origin. With Native Americans, World War II, and the integration of Native American troops into all-white units, went a long way toward breaking down some barriers. Thus, Native Americans who began to move away from the reservations found a path for them into the larger American society.
.
Other minorities and women have not had that ability. Which is why we still have these conversations about what is feasible. It’s why we still marvel, in the 21st century, at a black mayor being elected in Philadelphia, MS. And it’s why we have long discussions about sexism when it comes to female candidates for higher office.

@koabd: Of course I didn’t mean at all to imply that sexism and racism aren’t very real. But I do think that Hillary has proven the nation is ready. Now it’s about the right candidate at the right time. Hillary lost to an extraordinary politician — the kind you don’t see in every single election. She had the bad luck of having her best opportunity during a very competitive election cycle.

So it doesn’t matter to you whether women “make it” in politics, only that they subscribe to YOUR philosophy. OK, I get it.

GF was pretty unhappy about how the primary wound up. Aside from his “uniqueness,” needlessly complicated party rules mixed in with a dose of race preference and sexism helped seal HC’s fate. I wish people would vote for somebody regardless of those things, but we all know that people (especially the lesser informed/educated) don’t usually do that.

I vote for trailblazer BTW

Leftist?
.
Rusty, in 1984 the “leftists” had ICBMs pointed at Washington DC and Mondale Ferraro were more than happy to keep on the struggle against the Soviet Union due to their lack of human rights as liberals appreciate.
.
If some morons want to give up all private property, that is there problem, not ours. But, deny the people the right decide what their government does (fascist, communist or other dictatorship or monarchy ) and liberals object.
.
In 1984 if you called a Democrat a “leftist” since the odds were very high that he served in Korea Vietnam or peacetime in the cold war, they would be very insulted.
.
Of course you are totally unconcerned about reality, but love to toss around random words you do not understand.

GF was pretty unhappy about how the primary wound up. Aside from his “uniqueness,” needlessly complicated party rules mixed in with a dose of race preference and sexism helped seal HC’s fate
.
Just to be clear on what you’re implying: You’re saying our current president is in office because 1) he’s partly black; 2) Democratic voters were sexist; and 3) the rules of Democratic primaries screwed Clinton. Nothing to do with her own inadequecies as a candidate? That sounds awful like a right-wing misapplication of what affirmative action does. I’m just sayin’.

Yes to all.
And that’s not to say that she didn’t (and doesn’t) have flaws and made mistakes…Bill’s insinuation that people voted for BO ’cause he’s (half)black didn’t help either.
.
Honestly I don’t know who was the better candidate of the two. But thanks to a measure of your 1) 2) and 3) points we may never know. I’m over that to the extent that our prez, for all his lack of cajones on some issues, is one I support and will do so for another five years, hopefully.
.
(I speak as an AA who happens to live in FL, just so you know my perspective.)

“(I speak as an AA who happens to live in FL, just so you know my perspective.)”
.
I didn’t know you were an alcoholic. I wish you the very best in your efforts to get sober. One day at a time.

“Not even the much-proclaimed 1992 as “The Year of the Woman,” when five women were elected to the U.S. Senate, earned a cover.”

“In the twenty years following Ferraro’s 1984 run, U.S. female politicians appeared on the cover of TIME a grand total of four times.”

I think what this shows is that a woman has to be an “exceptional” female politician to get the same recognition that an average male politician would receive. I think that if Jimmy Carter or GWB had been female the consensus would have been “Now this is why we don’t elect women as President”.

“One down, one to go.” Thanks for this poignant summation of the past decades of feminists in politics. We’ll get there; 2020 is my bet.