Women making up slightly more than half of the population wasn’t new, but by the early 1980s they were turning up on Election Day just as often as men were and, among some age groups, more often. Case in point: Ferraro frying the eggs.įor one thing, putting a woman on a major ticket had started to seem like what DNC political director Ann Lewis called “the logical next step.” Lewis wasn’t just talking about making strides for women she was also talking about the logic of politics. (As TIME pointed out, there’s a vicious cycle at work with that last component: raising less money actually can make a candidate less likely to be elected.) And, just as importantly, old stereotypes about women’s proper roles were still very much in play. Women lacked an in at the literal old-boys’ clubs where politics took place, they tended not to have union support and they had trouble raising money because they were seen as unelectable. The reasons for the lack of progress were many. But not that long ago, when Ferraro was first introduced to TIME readers in 1978, as she sought a seat in Congress, it was with a sadly familiar trope: she was frying eggs for her family’s breakfast, trying to be a “good mother and wife” while doing something that “few women in Queen-or elsewhere-have considered.” More than a decade of feminist activism had only produced a relative handful of women in Congress.
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