{"id":1833,"date":"2018-07-22T11:45:49","date_gmt":"2018-07-22T18:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=1833"},"modified":"2018-07-22T11:45:49","modified_gmt":"2018-07-22T18:45:49","slug":"womens-rights-moves-into-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=1833","title":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s rights moves into politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing my exploration of feminism in the 1970s, a profile for my New Zealand newspaper of a woman political candidate.<\/p>\n

Women in Politics Part II<\/strong>
\nWomen\u2019s rights moves into politics<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Rhoda<\/a>

Rhoda Freier: Photo by Gordon Lew in the Cupertino Courier<\/em> 1\/3\/1973.<\/p><\/div>\n

Cupertino, CA, October 1972
\n<\/em>Rhoda Freier is a new phenomenon in American politics. She is an avowed feminist who has carried the banner of the women\u2019s movement out of the rap sessions and the action groups, and into the male-dominated arena of party politics. As the Democratic Party candidate for the 22nd<\/sup> California Assembly District, her platform is environmental protection and zero population growth.<\/p>\n

Until seven years ago Rhoda Freier\u2019s life reflected the malaise of many an American housewife whose children are gone off to school, leaving her with time on her hands. Then the Freiers moved to California. Suddenly all her latent dissatisfactions burst into full bloom. “California does that to people,” she says. Maybe it’s something in the air!”She went back to college to continue her studies in biology and to upgrade her teaching qualification. Her biology studies led her next to Zero Population Growth. Environmental and population concerns began to coalesce into women\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n

National Organization for Women (NOW) was the culmination of all these interests and the one which has commanded her strongest loyalties. She became president of the South San Francisco Bay chapter two years ago. As the mainstream of the women\u2019s movement moved toward politics as the only effective method of achieving equality for women, it pushed her along with it.<\/p>\n

Diffident and unwilling at first, she surprised herself by winning the three-way race for the Democratic nomination for 22nd<\/sup> District with a handsome 50 percent of the votes. The general election next month is going to be a more difficult proposition. \u201cNo matter how strongly you feel about an issue, you have to know how to go about it, and I really didn\u2019t.\u201d Her neophyte campaign organization functions on \u201ca crisis to crisis basis.\u201d Like most candidates, she directs the emphasis herself, with help from consultants within the Democratic Party. It is a strongly woman-centered effort, drawing heavily from NOW and ZPG. Her financial director is a busy young woman with a pre-school family and a part-time job as a children\u2019s librarian, who has still found time to organize events like the jumbo-sized garage sale which netted a whopping $600 for the campaign coffers.<\/p>\n

But by no means is it a female chauvinist affair. Ms Freier\u2019s husband is her campaign manager. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb<\/em>, has taken time to speak on her behalf. Promises of help in the crucial pre-election work have come from prominent and experienced male members of the local Democratic Party.<\/p>\n

Lack of funds is a chronic problem. Democrats, lacking the big business resources of the Republican Party, have traditionally relied heavily on union support. This in Ms Freier\u2019s case has been conspicuously lacking, partly through her own inexperience, and partly through union opposition to the women\u2019s Equal Rights Amendment, which she supports.<\/p>\n

The attitude of the local press, who consistently refer to her as \u201cthe Women\u2019s Lib candidate,\u201d has also been an obstacle. \u201cI have no qualms about being identified as a feminist. But the term \u2018lib\u2019 or \u2018libber\u2019 is used in a denigrating way that is very damaging and insulting.\u201d<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t feel that being a woman is all that much of a handicap. But neither is it a conspicuous asset. A survey by the National Women\u2019s Political Caucus showed that, of thirty new women candidates in the June primary election, only twelve are still in the race, and only two of these, including Rhoda Freier, won contested primaries.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to know what the factors were: unwillingness to vote for a woman; inexperience on the part of the woman running; lack of money? We\u2019ll never know. But I\u2019m certainly not doing what I did initially, which was to point out that we haven\u2019t even reached the level of tokenism in the number of women in the legislature. Some people may be concerned about this, but the vast majority clearly aren\u2019t.\u201d Nowadays I tackle the positive aspects of my candidacy rather than the fact that I am a woman. I have tried to promote myself as a candidate who is more knowledgeable than most of the other legislators in environmental matters and in the need for population stabilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

But she does feel that her candidacy will have an impact on the image of women. \u201cThe fact of a woman coming forward as a women\u2019s candidate opens new avenues of thought to a whole lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

POSTSCRIPT: Rhoda Freier lost the election to the Republican incumbent Assemblyman\u00a0 Richard Hayden, but went on to help establish a Bay Area chapter of the nonpartisan National Women\u2019s Political Caucus.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continuing my exploration of feminism in the 1970s, a profile for my New Zealand newspaper of a woman political candidate. Women in Politics Part II Women\u2019s rights moves into politics Cupertino, CA, October 1972 Rhoda Freier is a new phenomenon in American politics. She is an avowed feminist who has carried the banner of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,498],"tags":[501],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1833"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1839,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions\/1839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}